


Here We Are, Don't Turn Away

by Escapist_Velocity



Series: No Armor Against Fate [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Female Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mandalorian Culture, Mando'a, Philosophical Discussions, bisexual Obi-Wan, flirty teenagers, mandalorian Obi-Wan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:48:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 22,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23533315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Escapist_Velocity/pseuds/Escapist_Velocity
Summary: To be honest, Quinlan had no idea why he and Master Tholme had been sent to answer Duke Adonai Kryze’s call for aid.  They were a Shadow team, more suited to undercover or infiltration ops. They worked with criminals and security types, not nobles and politicians.Fortunately for everyone, Quinlan gets some unexpected help from an old friend...Appendix chapter is a Mando'a glossary
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Quinlan Vos, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Satine Kryze
Series: No Armor Against Fate [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693513
Comments: 96
Kudos: 637





	1. Rendezvous

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all. If you haven't read the first work in this series, you may want to. It is fairly AU and the set-up might be needed.
> 
> Comments that are character-bashing will be deleted. I'm not looking for the comments section to become a place of negativity, and I will take measures that it doesn't.

Quinlan scowled at Master Tholme, hating every single aspect of the plan.

“But what about you, Master?” he asked, tightening his grip on their charge’s arm when she shifted like she was going to try to break away. He ignored her indignant huff. Master Tholme didn’t even blink.

“I will be drawing our pursuers away, covering for your and Lady Kryze’s escape,” he replied. “The New Mandalorians have allies in the industrial sector of the city. If you reach the coordinates I sent to your comm, they should be waiting for you. I have also sent you the passcodes to confirm their identity, and yours.”

“But—!” Quinlan protested. His Master held up a staying hand, and Quinlan subsided. Grudgingly.

“We must be quick,” Master Tholme said, touching the controls of his wristcomm briefly. Quinlan’s comm pinged quietly on his own wrist. “Mute that. Then go.”

And without waiting for a response, he disappeared with a silent flap of his cloak. Quinlan thought a few choice words, sharp and pointed. Through their bond, Tholme sent mild amusement and a stern prod. _Go_.

“Well, come on, your worshipfulness,” he said, tugging on Kryze a little. She scowled fiercely at him.

“For some reason, I expected Jedi to be more _genteel_ ,” she said coldly. Quinlan scoffed.

“Afraid you got the wrong team for that,” he said. “We’re not here to be diplomatic, we’re here to keep you alive. Let’s move.”

To be honest, Quinlan had no idea why he and Master Tholme had been sent to answer Duke Adonai Kryze’s call for aid. They were a Shadow team, more suited to undercover or infiltration ops. They worked with criminals and security types, not nobles and politicians. A Jedi team with more diplomacy experience would be able to protect Lady Satine Kryze just as well as he and Tholme could and they’d be… what had she called it?... more genteel about it.

But another team hadn’t been sent, he reminded himself. It was just him and his master. As much as she annoyed him, he was the only thing right now standing between Kryze and death. He wasn’t going to let her die. He wasn’t going to fail.

It was night on Mandalore, which some might erroneously assume meant it was a good time for sneaking around, but in truth it was the worst time. The only people outside currently were Quinlan, Tholme, Lady Kryze, and the people trying to kill them. There were no crowds to disappear into, no open businesses to duck into to lose pursuers. The city was lit up with thousands of lights, banishing most of the shadows they might have hidden in. And air traffic was much decreased, making any ship they might be able to secure just that much easier to see… and shoot down. No, night was an _awful_ time to try to escape pursuers.

Their best bet was to do as Master Tholme said: Get to the rendezvous, meet up with their allies, and then lay low until morning.

Quinlan half-dragged Kryze through the streets, doing his best to keep quiet and not draw attention to them. She wasn’t practiced at walking quietly, though, and her footsteps echoed in the empty streets. He wanted to make her take her boots—impractically heeled things—off and go barefoot but the streets were hardly clean and it would make them even easier to track, besides. He also wanted to just hoist her over his shoulder and take to the rooftops but he very much doubted she’d let him. And he very much doubted he could, what with the elaborate and voluminous gown she wore.

 _First thing we’ll have to do after we get somewhere safer,_ Quinlan promised himself, _is get her something better to wear._

He didn’t blame her, exactly. He just thought that all that hoighty-toighty noble _druk_ was useless and stupid, even when you weren’t running for your life. What was wrong with normal functional clothes? Politicians and nobles seemed to think that they needed fancy clothes to be able to do their jobs, for some reason.

Quinlan jerked to a halt, pressing Kryze into the wall and the shadow of his body. Several figures passed by the end of the street, light glinting off characteristic Mandalorian helmets. He held his breath as they passed, hoping they wouldn’t spot him or if they did that they wouldn’t look more closely and notice Kryze behind him.

They disappeared down the cross-street and he let out a breath of relief. He stepped away from Kryze, letting her move away from the wall. Her face was pale—well, paler than normal—and fear wafted off her in the Force. Quinlan felt a grudging respect that she hadn’t screamed or outwardly reacted in any other way to the threat. But they weren’t out of hot water yet, so he just whispered: “Come on, your Grace. We have to keep moving.”

She visibly collected herself, and nodded. Quinlan took her hand, and they hurried on.

The streets were mostly quiet but Quinlan felt a growing sense of dread opening a pit in his gut. This was too easy. Why was it so easy? They shouldn’t be able to just _walk_ out of Sundari, sneaking or no. There had to be something wrong or else the Force wouldn’t be prickling against his skin. The unease increased the closer they got to the rendezvous, until Quinlan was almost entirely certain they were walking into a trap.

When he touched the door control that led to the mechanics’ hangar where they were to meet their allies, the Force’s warning sharpened into a knife. Quinlan’s spine went rigid and he huffed a punched-out breath as the Force echo of an ambush and slaughter lanced through him.

He jerked back, hissing softly. “We have to go. Now.”

Kryze, without the dubious benefit of feeling what the Force was screaming, didn’t understand. “What? But our allies—”

“They’re _dead_ , your Grace,” Quinlan snarled, keeping his voice low. He pulled at her. “And we need to leave before we’re next.”

“Dead? What?” she choked out, stumbling. “How do you know?”

“I feel it in the Force,” Quinlan said shortly. They needed to _go_ , before—

The hangar’s door opened, and four Death Watch soldiers boiled out, blasters already shooting. Quinlan spat out a couple choice words in Huttese and flicked his wrist to activate the small deflector shield built into his vambrace, curving his arm around Kryze to protect her from the hail of blaster bolts. With his other hand, he jerked out his own blaster and started returning fire. With the Force he was a crackshot, easily picking off one enemy with precise shots to weak areas of their armor. The others spread out, finding cover and shooting with disciplined coordination. Quinlan shoved Kryze behind his own body and the shield, eyes narrowing. That was the problem with professionals: They knew what they were doing.

Quinlan was very aware of his lightsaber, hidden away in a secret pocket in his clothes. Master Tholme believed it would be best if Death Watch didn’t know that Lady Kryze had Jedi guards; Mandalorians had a historical grudge against Jedi and being associated with them might make her position even more dangerous. So they’d hidden their ‘sabers away, taken up more unobtrusive weapons. It wasn’t the first time they had done so and it wouldn’t be the last—Shadow work often meant hiding one’s Jedi status.

Quinlan left his lightsaber where it was, but still reached for the Force, tightening his grasp on his blaster. They were professionals, but so was he; he was trained to Master Tholme’s exacting standards on a variety of weapons. Three on one wasn’t great odds, even for someone with a Jedi’s preternatural precision, but he would manage.

It wasn’t easy. By the time he nailed the last one between the chest plates of their armor, he had a blaster score along one arm and a full blaster burn on his calf. Kryze had buried her face into his shoulder much earlier, and now her ragged breathing was loud in the sudden silence. Her distress also rippled loudly out into the Force.

“Come on,” Quinlan said, out of breath. “Before more come.”

It had become something of a race, rather than a stealthy escape. Quinlan had no doubt the Death Watch soldiers had reported their location. He had to find a ship and get Kryze to it, and off Mandalore, before reinforcements could corner them.

Kryze’s face was wet with tears and she was trembling, but Quinlan had no time to talk her down, not if he also wanted to save her life. He pulled her through the streets once more, hoping that they would get lucky.

It was a vain hope, but Quinlan couldn’t help himself.

 _‘Loves all its children, the Force does,’_ he thought as he dodged a party of two Death Watch, a deep, deep sarcasm infusing the quoted words. _‘Like kriff it does!’_

He shot twice in quick succession and a body fell from a rooftop above them. Kryze whimpered at the heavy _thwack_ the body made as it impacted the ground. Quinlan just cursed as more Death Watch rounded the corner in front of them. He jerked to a halt and pushed Kryze against a wall. They were surrounded. _‘Sithspit!’_

He was already injured and there were more than four of them this time.

 _‘We could really use your help, Master!’_ Quinlan sent down his training bond. Tholme wouldn’t get the words—that wasn’t how their bond had manifested—but he’d get the general feeling.

If Tholme didn’t come…

Quinlan could probably, maybe, hold against them if he used his lightsaber. But it would definitely blow their cover, and with the Mando grudge against Jedi Quinlan wasn’t entirely sure they wouldn’t just try harder to kill him if they saw he was one. And if they tried harder to kill _him_ , then they were also trying harder to kill Kryze…

_‘Damned if I do and damned if I—E chuta, not more of them!’_

Quinlan froze mid-grimace, though, because the newcomer who had dropped among the Death Watch soldiers wasted no time in pulling out a vibroblade sword and was wreaking complete havoc on them. The newcomer moved like a damn nexu, agile and deadly, and—

Was that a kriffing _Ataru_ flip? What the kriff? Had they sent another Jedi team to support him and Master Tholme?

Quinlan didn’t realize his blaster arm was sagging until a high-powered rifle bolt sizzled through the nearest Death Watch, jolting his attention back to the whole area. He quickly leveled his weapon and started shooting again, taking care now that they had an ally on the field.

With the support of his two new allies—the melee fighter and whoever was sniping Death Watch from the rooftops—the fight was over quickly. Once the danger had faded back into the background ‘we’re being chased’ sort rather than the immediate ‘we’re cornered’ kind, Quinlan stretched his Force presence out toward the two, inquisitive. He kept Kryze tucked behind him, though. As far as he knew, their only allies on this rock had just been massacred by Death Watch. He didn’t know who these people were. They might fight like a Jedi (sort of…) but they were also dressed in full Mandalorian armor.

Quinlan brushed against their minds, and stiffened. One was clearly not a Jedi, not even Force-sensitive, and he felt like both danger and safety at once. He was the sniper, and a grim sort of satisfaction suffused his being as he made a last check of their surroundings before using his jetpack to join his companion on the street. His companion…

“Who _are_ you?” Quinlan demanded. His Force touch had been answered by a polite rebuff, a sort of gentle mental distancing. The response was that of a well-trained Force-sensitive, and was furthermore flavored with a hint of _fondness_. Which was very much not a response Quinlan had ever gotten as the padawan of a Jedi Shadow.

The two figures glanced at each other, and then the shorter one, the one who’d fought with a vibroblade, moved forward.

Quinlan nearly choked on his own tongue when they pulled their helmet off, revealing a face that Quinlan _knew_.

“Obi-Wan?!”


	2. Allies

“We have a ship, but we have to be quick and quiet,” Obi-Wan said. She didn’t smile, didn’t respond to him, didn’t even seem to acknowledge she knew him, and Quinlan felt a flush of indignation and—he could admit at least to himself—some hurt. But he was also entirely aware that it was hardly the time and place for such personal feelings.

“Right,” he said, and turned to take Kryze’s arm and help her away from the wall. She was trembling again, or perhaps still, and her hand closed around Quinlan’s arm like a vice. He let her cling and turned back to Obi-Wan. “Which way?”

They led Quinlan and Kryze through the streets a short distance away, to a small unassuming hangar where a small unassuming ship waited. It was plain grey with no identifying marks beyond a neat line of Mandalorian letters just above one of the forward stabilizers. Quinlan couldn’t read it.

He felt a flare of shock and anger from Kryze, though, and turned to blink at her. She ignored him, wrenching her wrist from his grasp and marching up the ship’s ramp after Obi-Wan and the taller still-unnamed Mando. Quinlan hustled after, brow furrowing.

“You’re True Mandalorians!” Kryze accused, standing in the door of the cockpit with her hands akimbo. Quinlan hovered behind her, curious to see where this would go, and wary of complications. Inside the cockpit, the unnamed Mando ignored her, punching the controls to seal up the ship and get the basic life-support systems running. Beside them, sans-helmet, Obi-Wan blinked at Kryze.

“Yes? We are?” she said, sounding perplexed. Kryze huffed.

“Why are you helping us?”

This obviously did not clear things up for Obi-Wan, who shared a look with her fellow Mando. Quinlan got the sense of a soundless sigh from them and, finally, they swiveled in the pilot’s chair to face the doorway, hands lifting to remove the helmet. Quinlan stared avidly, trying to fix the face into his memory. A man, strong-featured with a nose that had clearly been broken before and healed slightly crooked. Perhaps thirty Standard, maybe a little younger. Skin lighter than Quinlan’s but darker than Obi-Wan’s (not that that was particularly hard, the girl was ghost-pale as ever). Changeable hazel eyes with a sharp gleam of intelligence. He eyed Kryze thoughtfully, glance flicking over Quinlan briefly before returning to the Lady.

“Why wouldn’t we help you?” he asked. Calm. A more typical Mandalorian accent than Kryze’s Core-polished mincing.

“You… Your ship’s name is _Ori’ramikad_!” she said. “You’re True Mandalorians!”

“Yes, we are,” he said, and even though his voice was calm he seemed dangerous. “Did you expect us to side with Death Watch?”

Quinlan suppressed the physical wince, but saw Obi-Wan side-eye him with the twitch at the corner of her mouth that had always meant she wanted to smirk. He must have projected something of his reaction in the Force. To her credit, Kryze also looked chagrined.

“No, of course not. I only…”

The Mando lifted a brow. “ _Aru’e be ner’aru’e cuyi narudar._ I may not agree with the New Mandalorian philosophy, but I would rather that than Death Watch’s.”

“That is true,” Kryze sighed, the fight draining out of her. “I apologize for my inconsiderate words.”

“It’s understandable under the conditions.”

“May I know the names of my allies?” Kryze asked, her posture straightening as she rallied.

“Maddyr Osan,” the Mando introduced himself. “And this is my daughter, Obi-Wan.”

“Daughter?!” Quinlan exclaimed, shocked. Everyone turned to look at him, and he valiantly suppressed an embarrassed flush. “I… You’re not really, though, are you? I mean, Obi-Wan’s Stewjoni!”

“He _is_ my father, in the only way that matters,” Obi-Wan said icily. There was no trace of humor in her expression now. Quinlan winced.

“No, that’s… I wasn’t… I didn’t mean—!”

“I adopted Obi-Wan. By Mandalorian law, she’s my daughter,” Osan said, watching Quinlan thoughtfully. “It was even with the blessings of your Order, _jetii’ad_.”

“What?” Quinlan turned again confusedly to Obi-Wan. “But I thought they sent you to the Agri-Corps!”

“They did,” Obi-Wan said, her Core-World accent snapping on the short syllables. Oh no, she was _really mad_. Quinlan had only gotten her this mad twice when they were at the Temple together.

Maybe Kryze had been on to something with her _genteel_ comment. Kriff, he was messing this up. Quinlan searched desperately for something to say—something that _wasn’t_ a verbal grenade—but ended up floundering silently, staring at Obi-Wan. He was sure he was radiating dismay and regret and awkwardness, and hoped she could tell he wasn’t being an ass on purpose, this time.

“Well,” said Osan, something deeply sardonic in his tone. “We can’t take off until daylight, so we’ll be laying low in here until then. I can show you where the fresher is, and the galley. There’s only two bunks on board, so we’ll have to sleep in shifts, though.”

Quinlan managed to get his foot out of his mouth enough to reply. “Thank you; whatever you can offer is appreciated. I… my Master is on-planet too...”

“I’ve already contacted Master Tholme,” Obi-Wan said and the impersonality of her tone _hurt_. He hesitated, wanting to respond, but in the end just nodded.

Obi-Wan remained in the cockpit, monitoring the ship’s sensor readouts, and Osan led Kryze and Quinlan to the ship’s tiny cabin. Quinlan felt like a kicked akk-dog, retreating with his tail tucked. It chafed. He wanted to turn around and make things right, but he didn’t know what to say to do so.

The cabin was completely taken up by the bunk bed inside, a scant foot of floor free along one side to allow the occupants to crawl onto the thin mattresses.

“I will take the upper bunk,” Quinlan said, eyeing Kryze. She just nodded, looking wan.

“The fresher is across the hall, as is the galley. There’s a med-bot in the galley, if you need treatment for those blaster burns,” Osan told Quinlan. The older man glanced at Kryze and added: “I’ll pull together something warm for you two to eat. Rest, in the meantime.”

“Thank you,” she said, a little faintly, and moved to sit on the lower bunk with a sort of numb sense about her. Adrenaline crash, probably. Quinlan, after a brief hesitation, left to follow Osan to the galley, to take advantage of the med-droid.

Like the rest of the ship, the galley was small. Osan gestured for Quinlan to take a seat at the tiny table, punching the quick-activation switch for the FA unit sitting in its charge port on the wall.

“Please state the nature of the medical emergency,” said the droid in an officious tone, as it slid from the port. Osan waved a laconic hand toward Quinlan, already turning away to dig through a couple of the galley’s storage bins.

“Uh,” Quinlan said, drawing the attention of the FA unit. “Just some blaster burns.”

The droid’s optics focused on him, making a faint whirring sound as the aperture adjusted. “Kiffar male, age approximately 14-18. Blaster burns on right calf and across left arm. Damage to gastrocnemius muscle assured, damage to deltoid muscle probable. Please remove the clothing obscuring the areas.”

Well, the leg was easy—he could just roll up his pant leg. But his arm…

He hesitated, but gave a mental shrug and shucked his tunic. It wasn’t his Jedi-styled front-opening tunic, so he had to actually remove the whole thing, dragging it over his head with a wince at the way the motion pulled the burn. The FA unit swooped closer to get better scans of the injuries.

“Superficial damage to deltoid muscle confirmed. Bacta patches suggested treatment for both burns, and a hypospray recommended for the pain. Please remain still.”

Quinlan hissed at the pinch of the hypospray, but the pain of the burns faded to just the barest ache almost immediately afterwards. Even when the droid sprayed an antiseptic directly onto the raw skin, he couldn’t feel the sting.

“So,” Osan said. He didn’t look up from chopping some unidentifiable vegetables. “I gather you knew Obi-Wan from before?”

Quinlan froze. ‘ _This feels like a trap.’_ It was, in a way, masterful. Quinlan was a captive audience as the droid treated him and he was put in a vulnerable mindset by being half naked in front of someone who may or may not be a threat. “Um.”

“She doesn’t talk very much about the Jedi, unless directly questioned,” Osan said. “But I’ve heard a few things.”

A brief glance up and a meeting of Quinlan’s gaze communicated just how Osan felt about what he had heard. Quinlan swallowed, looking away. “We… we knew each other. I was a couple years older and I knew Obi-Wan and her crèche clan through the mixed-age classes we all took. I don’t know if we could be called friends, exactly, but I liked her and I thought she liked me.”

“Hm,” Osan said thoughtfully. “But you didn’t know what had happened to her.”

Quinlan felt a spurt of anger. “Nobody did! Not even her close friends; we all thought she was in the Agri-Corps!”

Osan’s gaze snapped up, blazing and intense, pinning Quinlan to the spot. “What? You mean to tell me—? _Shabla di’kutla jetiise; val mirshse solus!”_

“What?” Quinlan asked warily as Osan put his knife down and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I found Obi-Wan on a slave ship,” Osan said, blunt. Quinlan felt a little shiver in the Force, and knew exactly what had happened to those slavers. He couldn’t say he was bent out of shape about it. He and Master Tholme were Shadows; they walked the places of the galaxy that were the farthest from the Light. He knew what probably would have happened to Obi-Wan if the slavers hadn’t been stopped. “She was on a slave ship with a collar at her throat, and she believed nobody would bother to come rescue her. After all, the Jedi hadn’t wanted her to begin with.”

Every bit of Quinlan wanted to protest, but… He’d heard the whispers in the Temple. They’d called Obi-Wan arrogant, angry, dangerous. Nobody had approached Obi-Wan as a possible Master.

“We did,” he said, very quietly, knowing it wasn’t enough. “Her friends wanted her.”

Osan quirked an eyebrow. There was a split in it, an old wound that had left a faint scar climbing up his forehead. “Well, your Masters seemed perfectly content letting her wander off into the galaxy with a complete stranger, just days after she’d been freed from slavers.”

“The Force must have—”

“The Force!” snorted Osan. The FA unit finished treating his burns and Osan sent it back to its charge port. “You Jedi like to hold ‘the Force’ up as some unquestionable arbiter. Do you need the Force to tell you that slavery is bad? That glitterstim runners that use children as drug mules should be stopped? Do you need it to tell you to stop them every time you run into a new one? I would hope that the Force isn’t the beginning and the end of a Jedi’s conscience, or I shudder to think what happens on those occasions the Force is silent.”

“The Jedi aren’t perfect,” Quinlan said quietly, “but we’re _trying_.”

“Try harder,” Osan rejoined flatly. Quinlan looked up to glare into his face for a moment, but he didn’t so much as flinch. After a moment, Quinlan deflated, looking down at his toes.

“Obi-Wan… she’s alright now? She’s happy?” he asked, hesitant.

“Now you're finally asking the right questions,” Osan said. But he pointedly didn’t answer, and Quinlan for once listened to caution and didn’t press.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quinlan definitely seems to me like someone who pushes buttons both intentionally and not. He's really good at provoking people when he wants, and when he doesn't want he still had chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome.
> 
> Comments that are character-bashing will be deleted. I'm not looking for the comments section to become a place of negativity, and I will take measures that it doesn't.


	3. Fight or Flight

After eating, Quinlan crashed hard. When he woke up, it was nearing dawn and Master Tholme had joined them; he could feel his proximity though their bond. It prompted Quinlan into peeling his fatigue-swollen eyes open and dragging his aching body out of the bunk bed. The bottom bunk was empty; Kryze, it seemed, was already awake.

Quinlan stifled a groan as he forced stiff muscles to move; the painkiller hypo had worn off in the night and, though the burns were nearly completely healed, his body was protesting what he’d put it through. He stretched and rubbed at his muscles as he shuffled into the fresher. After a quick sonic and some other ablutions, he felt a bit better and more prepared to interact with other people.

He could sense where everyone on board was—Tholme was with Osan in the cockpit, presumably discussing their next steps and course, and Obi-Wan and Kryze were in the galley. He headed toward the latter grouping; Tholme would let him know if anything important happened in the cockpit.

He could hear Kryze and Obi-Wan arguing even before he reached the door.

“—just giving up a life of _peace_ ; I don’t understand,” Kryze said.

“It _wasn’t_ a life of peace,” Obi-Wan replied, sharp. “Corps members aren’t given some bucolic dream of a farm where they’d do their work. They go into areas of political and economic unrest, many times where the locals mistrust and resent them, and sometimes where their lives are actively in danger from corrupt landowners and governments. And that’s saying nothing about the dangers of the actual work they do. The Agri-Corps has the second highest mortality rate in all the branches of the Order, after the Explora-Corps.”

Quinlan edged into the galley warily; the conversation seemed fraught and on the edge of becoming a fight, but… he was hungry.

“They… they kill them?” Kryze said. “But aren’t the Agri-Corps just farmers?”

Quinlan ground to a halt in the doorway, and knew he probably looked like an eopie caught in the crosshairs. Kriff, but couldn’t Kryze have _not_? At least, not until he’d gotten some food.

“Essentially,” Obi-Wan said, and why was she glaring at _him_? He’s not the one talking smack about the Corps! “But they are also part of the Jedi Order, and not everyone trusts the Order.”

Kryze frowned, but accepted that. She should understand; even if she’s New Mandalorian, she’s still Mandalorian, and the history between their two peoples wasn’t secret.

Seemingly done with the conversation, Obi-Wan turned to Quinlan. “We have foodboard or nutrient paste for you to break your fast.”

He tried not to grimace; neither option was the least bit tempting. But they were typical ones for a starship’s galley, so he just sighed a little and said: “Nutrient paste, thanks.”

She pulled open a drawer and handed him a packet as he skulked closer. “Your Master just got here; he’s with _buir_ in the cockpit.”

“I know,” Quinlan said, wishing interacting with Obi-Wan didn’t feel so awkward. They’d been friends, once. Now she felt like a stranger. “Any news?”

“Well, we’re still alive, so Death Watch didn’t find us in the night,” she replied. Quinlan rolled his eyes.

“I’d figured that out on my own, thanks.” He tried to decide if the flicker of expression on her face was a smirk. “Do you know what we’re doing next?”

Obi-Wan shrugged, and it struck Quinlan that she did it the Mandalorian way—rocking her head from side to side—rather than lifting her shoulders like she’d used to as a youngling in the crèche. _‘She really has changed,’_ he thought with a small pang of grief. He’d missed her, though now after talking with Osan he felt a bit guilty for not missing her enough to try to keep in touch. He and her friends had accepted that she’d gone to the Agri-Corps and, when Obi-Wan herself had stayed quiet, taken it to mean she wanted a little time to metaphorically lick her wounds. Because, after all, she was dealing with the ultimate shame of not making it as a Padawan. They’d all made so many assumptions.

“Hey, Obi-Wan,” he said, the words sticking a little in his throat. She look at him, met his gaze. “I, um…”

The sound of footsteps approaching down the hallway and the slight tug on the Force bond between him and Master Tholme alerted him of the adults’ approach. Obi-Wan’s attention shifted too, likely for similar reasons.

“We’ll talk later,” he said hurriedly, turning to greet his Master as the tall human entered the galley. “Master!”

Tholme nodded an acknowledgement to him, but Quinlan could tell his attention was mostly on Kryze, who was sitting at the tiny galley table, half-full cup of tea still clasped in her hands. She stared back at him in trepidation, feeling the atmosphere of the room change suddenly just as easily as Quinlan could, Force sensitivity or no. Osan slipped into the room behind Tholme, his face grim.

_‘Oh no.’_

“Your Grace,” Tholme said, his rough voice as gentle as it ever got. “I regret to inform you that your father the Duke is dead.”

The color drained from her face, and her expression hardened into stone. Quinlan felt his stomach swoop. This had all started with Satine losing her elder brother (and the Duke losing his heir) to a Death Watch assassin. The killing had prompted Duke Adonai to request Jedi protection for his family, and just in time. Quinlan and Master Tholme had only just arrived to prevent another, larger attack from wiping out the Kryze Clan. The Duke ordered his remaining family into hiding, and sent the Jedi with Satine, newly made his heir. But he had refused to join them in escaping, claiming that his duty was to stay with his people. He couldn’t just let Death Watch take the capital. Nothing they’d said had changed his mind.

And now he was dead, too.

“My sister?” Satine’s voice was level, but faint.

“Her whereabouts are unknown, to us and to Death Watch.”

Her head tilted the merest fraction of a degree. Master Tholme allowed her a moment, then said: “You are the Duchess of Mandalore now.”

Satine stared at him for a long moment. “Am I? Death Watch hasn’t taken Sundari?”

“The New Mandalorians fight for the capital,” Tholme said. Everyone was watching Satine.

Waiting for her orders, Quinlan realized. She seemed to realize it, too, drawing in a slow deep breath.

“I need to let my people know they are not alone,” she said finally, lifting her chin.

“We have a full holocam with advanced encryption in the cockpit,” Osan said, joining the conversation for the first time. “You can record a formal address and we’ll broadcast it securely.”

“Thank you.”

“Your Grace, if I may offer some advice,” Tholme said. “We can’t stay in one place long; Death Watch will be looking for you. We’ll need to leave Sundari soon.”

“I…” she said, then hesitated. Quinlan could almost hear her thinking about what her father had said, refusing to leave.

“You can’t help your people if Death Watch catches you and kills you, too,” Tholme said, implacable but as gentle as he knew how to be.

“But…”

“Tactically, it might be the best option,” Osan said. “Death Watch isn’t going to just let you go; they can’t afford to. If you stay in Sundari, they will tear the city apart looking for you. If you leave, they will have to divert some of their forces into pursuing you, weakening their efforts here.”

“Death Watch is moving to take control of the spaceports,” Tholme warned. “Once they do, it will become much more difficult to leave. But restrictions on entering will be more lax; if we leave now, we will still have the option to return.”

Satine hesitated a moment longer, then asked: “How long do I have before I must decide?”

“Two hours,” Tholme replied and she nodded and stood.

“I will inform you of my decision then. For now, I want a moment alone.”

“Of course.” Tholme and Osan shifted away from the door, allowing her to exit. Silence reigned in the galley after she’d gone, an echo of grief lingering in the hush. Obi-Wan was the one to break it, though her voice remained very soft.

“ _Buir,”_ she said. Osan sighed.

“ _Udesii, Ob’ika. Kar’tayli.”_

She subsided, frowning in a way Quinlan remembered meant the gears were turning in her head. Obi-Wan even at twelve had been blazingly perceptive, her sharp mind at turns praised and lamented by the Masters of the Temple. He wondered what she was thinking now.

Tholme’s hand landed on Quinlan’s shoulder, diverting his attention. “Osan mentioned you were injured when they found you, Padawan. I am pleased to see you up and seeming well.”

“Their med-droid fixed me up fine,” Quinlan muttered, mildly embarrassed. He could feel his Master brushing against his mind to verify the truth of his statement. For Tholme, this counted as fussing.

“Then I am doubly grateful for their assistance,” Tholme replied, turning to include the two Mandalorians in the conversation.

“Your gratitude should go to Obi-Wan,” Osan said. “If not for her insistence, we wouldn’t have been in Sundari to help.”

“Is that so?” Tholme pinned Obi-Wan with his gaze. Quinlan knew from experience just how unsettling it could be to be the sole focus of his Master’s attention, and empathized with the way Obi-Wan’s posture stiffened like she was trying not to fidget. “I am also pleased to see you doing so well with your new family, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Her chin lifted. “I am doing very well, Master Tholme.”

Tholme inclined his head, and Quinlan couldn’t help but cough a little at the subtle tension threading through the room. Tholme inspected her a moment longer, and then said: “My Padawan and I are about to do some meditation exercises. Would you care to join us?”

A soft sort of surprise colored the Force around Obi-Wan, and she hesitated a beat before nodding slowly. “I… Yes, Master Tholme. I think I’d like that.”

He nodded back. “Very well then.”

Osan muttered something under his breath that Quinlan couldn’t entirely catch, but knew was something uncomplimentary about Jedi. The Mandalorian warrior moved to leave the galley, waving an arm dismissively as he went. “Make sure you’re awake for Kryze’s decision. We’ll need to move fast, whatever she decides. I’ll be in the cockpit.”

“There will be room in the cargo bay for us,” Obi-Wan said, taking the lead and heading out the door. Master Tholme followed easily, and Quinlan brought up the rear, nervous. Sharing meditation was… intimate, in a way that was difficult for Force-users to explain to non-users. It wasn’t that they could read each others’ minds (although there _was_ a specific type of Force meditation that could join minds), but communing with the Force _together_ like they would be was… Well, the Force joined them, and sometimes their edges overlapped.

With the tension that stood between them, Jedi and former Jedi, and the weight of their grim situation, this wasn’t going to be a very comfortable meditation. But it was probably necessary, which Quinlan suspected was why Master Tholme offered. Doing this would clear the air between them faster than any conversation, and it carried far less possibility of misunderstanding than speech. They’d need to be aligned together for whatever was to come; no matter which way the Duchess decided to leap, they were going to be fighting for her life and their own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The finale of Clone Wars absolutely destroyed me; I was legit sobbing at the end, my husband was very concerned. Damn though, those visuals? That soundtrack? Damn.
> 
> Comments that are character-bashing will be deleted. I'm not looking for the comments section to become a place of negativity, and I will take measures that it doesn't.


	4. Escape

“I want to address my people,” the Duchess said. She stood in the cargo bay, pale under the lights, her eyes rimmed in red. She had clearly been crying in the time she’d spent locked in the bunk room. Osan and Master Tholme exchanged glances at the pronouncement, and apparently agreed that the Jedi should do the talking because Master Tholme stepped forward as Osan crossed his arms over his armored chest and leaned a hip against a nearby crate.

“Very well. Will we be broadcasting from Sundari, or from orbit?” Tholme asked, gently probing. 

The Duchess took a breath and allowed: “From orbit.”

Quinlan stood next to Obi-Wan, their shoulders brushing. The high he’d been feeling from meditation, his relief and joy at Obi-Wan opening her eyes after and finally looking at him with the softened expression of understanding—it all was fading in the face of the tension now rising in the cargo bay. Master Tholme waited a moment but when no more information was forthcoming, he cleared his throat softly. “And what course should we program into the navicomputer?”

The Duchess hesitated—only briefly, but enough that Quinlan noticed. His stomach swooped. All things considered, the only reason she would hesitate is if she didn’t think they’d approve of her plan.

Her chin lifted. “To take back Sundari and Mandalore, I need support. More support than two Jedi and two True Mandalorians. We are going to the clans. My father had allies; I must strengthen those ties and use them to oust Death Watch from my home.”

Another moment of stillness, as they all calculated the meaning of her response. Obi-Wan shifted from foot to foot. Osan’s eyes narrowed. Master Tholme stood outwardly unaffected, but Quinlan could feel his focus sharpen in the Force. “As the legal heir to the Senate-recognized Duke of Mandalore, you have the power to request aid from the Republic if you so wished.”

The Duchess’s jaw set. “I do not want a Republic army in my sector. This is a Mandalorian issue, and Mandalorians will resolve it.”

Quinlan glanced at Osan, but surprisingly he didn’t look pleased. Instead, the Mando was watching the Duchess with narrowed eyes, silent and thoughtful. Quinlan glanced at Obi-Wan, who was tapping her fingers against her frowning mouth. Master Tholme nodded slowly.

“I would advise you to keep the option in your mind,” he said solemnly, “but advising is all I can do. We will follow your lead.”

“Good,” the Duchess said, trying at complete confidence. But Quinlan could see the faultlines in her mask, could sense how uncertain she was in her position. She was trying as best as she could, thrust into the duchy by violence and death when she was only newly the heir in the first place. “Time is of the essence, yes? Let us get started.”

Osan pushed himself off the crate. “You’ll need to record your address in the cockpit. Obi-Wan, take your friend and flight-check the ship. Master Jedi, you may as well come with me and the Duchess.”

 _“Elek, buir_ ,” Obi-Wan said immediately, and seized Quinlan’s wrist. Quinlan, who had been _this close_ to demanding an explanation for what was going on, snapped his mouth shut and let her drag him away. He glanced back and caught Master Tholme’s eye briefly. His master gave him a slight nod, and a sense of _patience, padawan_ through their bond.

Patience. Patience was not Quinlan’s forte. Still, he’d had plenty of practice over the course of his training. He huffed out his frustration and looked to Obi-Wan. “Sorry, what did your dad want us to do?”

“Prep for flight,” she said. “Make fast anything loose in the ship. We’ll both do the cargo bay, then we’ll split up to hit the smaller cabins.”

“Sounds good,” he said, and suited action to word. There wasn’t actually much to do, considering the _Ori’Ramikad_ hadn’t taken on any cargo while in port, and nothing had really been touched since being made fast for its last flight. Still, nobody wanted any of the big supply crates or barrels sliding around during take-off, so it was best to check and check again. Quinlan was just double checking the green glow of a crate’s mag-clamp indicator lights when he cleared his throat.

“So… uh… what’s the Duchess think she’s going to accomplish going to talk to these clans?”

“How much do you know about Mandalorian politics?” Obi-Wan asked in reply. Quinlan shrugged.

“Not very much. It’s kind of a vassalage system, though, right?”

“Of a sort, I suppose. Families form Clans, though there’s plenty of adoption so not all Clans are blood-related. Clans can join into Houses, swearing loyalty and service to each other. Sometimes there’s a Mand’alor, a leader that all who swear to the _Resol’nare_ are obligated to follow. But sometimes there’s no Mand’alor and the Houses and Clans basically just do as they will according to their own charters.”

Quinlan blinked. “And the duchy?”

Obi-Wan sighed a little. “It was the Republic that created the duchy and elevated the Duke to it. Before that, Adonai Kryze was just the governor of Sundari. Many of the farthest flung worlds of the Sector wouldn’t even know we have a Duke, or a Duchess now I suppose. Duke Kryze’s rule hasn’t much changed the shape of the Mandalore Sector as a whole, though it did change some things about Sundari.”

“The Mandalore Sector isn’t united?” Quinlan asked, a little bit surprised but also not at all. A duchy had always seemed oddly out of character for Mandalore—the whole nobility class part of it—and it made sense that not all Mandalorians really recognized it.

“Not really. The Sector doesn’t have the infrastructure to really disseminate laws passed by the duchy; many planets have their own law enforcement, and some don’t have any at all. It’s… Well, do you remember learning about the old Jedi factions? It’s actually very similar to that.”

“Really?” Quinlan considered it. “I mean, I guess that makes sense. So far, the Mandalorians have seemed really similar to Jedi in other ways.”

Obi-Wan snickered. “They really are, but don’t tell them that. Tends to ruffle feathers.”

“I can imagine,” Quinlan said with a grin. “So, then… The Duchess is visiting the clans to try to establish a support base against Death Watch? Because maybe some of the clans haven’t really been recognizing the duchy prior to this?”

Obi-Wan nodded. “Essentially, yes. It looks like we’re done here, so you take the bunkroom and fresher, and I’ll take the galley?”

Quinlan kind of wanted to stay with her and ask more questions, get a better understanding of what he and Master Tholme had been tossed into, but… “Sure.”

* * *

The only thing in the bunkroom that was loose was the pile of the Duchess’s skirts heaped on the floor. She’d taken them off before going to sleep last night, revealing a pair of fitted trousers underneath, and had Quinlan not been nearly braindead with exhaustion at the time, he would have been indignant. But picking up the cloth now, he realized why she hadn’t shed them during their mad scramble through the streets of Sundari—under the outer layer of silk was a layer of sturdy blaster-resistant armorweave. Quinlan rolled his eyes at himself; he should have known, really. Politicians might do a lot of things he personally thought were stupid and foolish, but they usually weren’t that reckless with their lives.

He laid the skirts out on the lower bunk, then went to the fresher to check it. There were a lot more little items there that would make a mess tumbling around in a rough flight. Quinlan dropped them into the fixed, lidded containers provided for them, and then headed toward the galley to see how Obi-Wan was doing. He was immediately distracted as he ran into Master Tholme in the corridor. The older Jedi didn’t _look_ upset, and the Force was placid around him, but something about him made Quinlan hesitate. Maybe it was something coming through their bond?

“Master?”

Tholme looked up, and Quinlan hesitated but pressed on: “Is everything alright?”

His master laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, deliberating for a moment on how to answer. The words come eventually, slow and deliberate: “Kryze’s plan will bring trouble. We should be vigilant.”

“Master? More trouble than Death Watch hunting us?” Wasn’t she just planning on talking to people? Though, maybe if those people dislike her…

“She is drawing lines in the sand,” Master Tholme said gravely. “And it will not be appreciated by some.”

Quinlan nodded in understanding and recognition. Master Tholme squeezed his shoulder once, then lifted his hand away. “You have finished with your charge?”

“Yes, Master,” Quinlan replied. “I was just about to go check on Obi-Wan to see if she needed any help with the galley.”

“Then let us go,” Tholme said simply. “Osan will be initiating take-off shortly, and we will need to strap in for the duration. I believe the galley has crash webbing for its seats.”

“Expecting a rough flight, Master?”

“It is entirely too possible,” Tholme replied, dry. “If we’re lucky, Death Watch will not have much control over air traffic, but I expect they will be closely watching ships taking off from this area of the city.”

Quinlan grumbled at that, knowing his master was far too likely to be correct. Ugh. He hated getting shot at when he was flying… especially when he wasn’t the pilot. At least Osan seemed like a competent sort. Obi-Wan clearly regarded him highly, and Quinlan didn’t think it was all because he’s shown her kindness and care. She’d been the most principled person Quinlan had ever met, when they were Initiates together, and that hadn’t seemed to have changed by her donning Mando armor.

Obi-Wan was just finishing up helping Duchess Kryze buckle into her crash webbing when they entered the galley. Giving a strap one last tug and straightening, she told them: “There are enough seats in here for you. Do you know how the webbing works?”

“Yes,” Master Tholme assured her. His eyes measured the small seating alcove. “There will not be room for you.”

“I’m the co-pilot; I’ll be in the cockpit with _b_ _uir_ ,” she said. “Speaking of which…”

Tholme nodded. “We can manage here.”

Obi-Wan nodded back, and headed out at a trot. Quinlan and Master Tholme wasted no time planting themselves into the open seats and pulling the webbing around themselves. It was one of the configurations meant to be species-universal, so it took a couple moments to adjust all the buckles and straps, but they’d both dealt with the same configuration or similar many times and went about it efficiently.

“All hands brace for lift-off,” Osan’s voice came over the ship’s comm, just as Quinlan was fastening the last couple buckles. A moment later, there was a light lurch as the ship’s struts left the ground, and then the vague sensation of being pressed into their seats briefly before the inertial dampers smoothed it over.

Quinlan curled his hands over his thighs and stretched his Force sense as far out as he could. Even if he’d be stuck here, instead of the cockpit or a gunnery station, he wanted at least to know a little of what was going on out there. He felt Master Tholme’s steady patience, the Duchess’s prickly grief, Obi-Wan’s sharp determination, and Osan’s fierce focus. He stretched further, searching—

“Do you not like flying?” His eyes popped open, concentration broken by the unexpected question. He blinked at the Duchess.

“What?”

She glanced down at his hands, drawing attention to the fact that he’d clenched them into pale-knuckled fists. “Do you not like flying?”

Quinlan grunted. “Not as a passenger. I don’t— _gkk_!”

The Duchess gave a smothered little scream as the ship suddenly jerked and swooped too fast for the inertial dampers to entirely compensate for, throwing them against the straps of their crash webbing. Quinlan scowled and dove back into the Force.

“It’s… two ships,” he told Master Tholme, and the Duchess. Another swift juking of the ship cut him off momentarily. “They’re slower than us, though. We’ll be out of range of their weapons shortly. The dome gates are still open; they must still be under the duchy’s control.”

He could feel the engines of the _Ori’Ramikad_ increase in power through changes in the low thrumming they sent through the body of the ship. There were a few more evasive maneuvers that jostled them slightly, but soon enough the flight smoothed out into the gentle glide of micro-gravity orbit.

Quinlan braced for hyperspace, but instead the ship lingered. “What’s going on?”

“Osan is uploading the Duchess’s speech to Mandalore’s satellites,” Master Tholme said. “He assured us it will only take two minutes to accomplish, after which the address will play on an emergency channel that Death Watch will not be able to shut down. It should also beam to the other networked satellites in the system.”

Quinlan frowned. “We’d better hurry, because those ships are still—”

“Prepare for jump to hyperspace,” Osan announced fortuitously, “in three…. two… one…”

The _Ori’Ramikad_ shivered slightly as it entered hyperspace, leaving realspace and Mandalore behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm making up/changing Mandalorian politics a bit.
> 
> Comments that are character-bashing will be deleted. I'm not looking for the comments section to become a place of negativity, and I will take measures that it doesn't.


	5. Diplomacy

They headed first for a planet called Atevalu, in the Gorgan System. It was far from Sundari and the Mandalore System, but it was clanhome to Clan Grete, one of Clan Kryze’s longtime allies. It made a great deal of sense to head there first, despite the distance.

They’d be in hyperspace for several hours, so they all extracted themselves from the crash webbing and found things to pass the time. Master Tholme headed to the cockpit, presumably to reconvene with Osan about plans. Quinlan accompanied him, wanting to find Obi-Wan again to continue their conversation from earlier. He felt like he had a lot to learn about Mandalore, lots of subtle things that somehow hadn’t made it into the Temple Archives’ files. Who better to teach him than Obi-Wan?

But she wasn’t in the cockpit, must have left immediately after they reached hyperspace. Quinlan lingered long enough to know that he wouldn’t have anything to add to the discussion between Master Tholme and Osan, then slipped out of the cockpit and took a moment to stretch out in the Force, looking for Obi-Wan’s signature. She was very strongly shielded and he could only _barely_ sense her, probably only by virtue of the fact that he knew her and was familiar with her Force signature. 

She was in the bunkroom. The Duchess was with her, and Quinlan hesitated a moment, unsure if he should interrupt their muffled conversation. But someone had set the door on a sensor, and it swished open as Quinlan lingered outside it. The two women looked up, blinking, and Quinlan grimaced apologetically.

“Sorry, I…” he realized they were holding hands and nearly choked on his own spit “...um...I didn’t mean to interrupt?”

The Duchess dropped Obi-Wan’s hand. “That— It’s fine. We were just discussing… religion.”

The Force shivered. But the pall of grief still hung over the Duchess, and it was only half a lie, so Quinlan didn’t push. Maybe they’d been talking about something personal to Mandalorians, something they didn’t want to talk about with an outsider like Quinlan.

He tried to ignore the prickle of jealousy at the hand-holding. It had nothing to do with him.

 _‘Wasn’t that the problem_?’

Quinlan coughed lightly into his fist. “Ah… I just wanted to check in with Obi-Wan… if there was anything we needed to do, post-take-off?”

Obi-Wan probably could feel the mild lie of his words, just like he’d felt the lie of the Duchess’s, but she didn’t say anything. Instead she took his question seriously. “Not really. Ship’s read-outs are all green. But we should probably check your injuries; you probably don’t need the bacta patches anymore.”

He perked up, even if it hadn’t been his intent, he was more than ready to get the stiff, sticky patches off. They didn’t hurt, but they pulled at his skin oddly when he moved and they _itched_. “Sithspit, yes, please!”

Obi-Wan’s mouth quirked. “We should get Fagen to check you, so let’s go to the galley.”

She stood from the bed, touching the Duchess’s shoulder very lightly with the tips of her fingers. “Are you staying here, your Grace?”

The noblewoman hesitated almost imperceptibly before responding. “I need to plan our next moves, for after we reach Atevalu. I’ll stay here to work on it.”

Obi-Wan nodded and led Quinlan out the door. After they’d walked far enough that the Duchess wouldn’t hear, Obi-Wan asked: “So what is the real reason you were looking for me?”

“Ah,” Quinlan said, only mildly embarrassed. He rubbed the qukuuf that crossed the bridge of his nose. “I just wanted to ask you some stuff about Mandalorians.”

She lifted an eyebrow at him. “And you didn’t want to ask the _Duchess of Mandalore_.”

“Well, no,” he admitted. “I mean, yeah, she’d probably know the answers, but… You were raised in the Temple, you went to all the same Initiate classes as I did. You know how to explain things so that I’ll understand them.”

The tips of Obi-Wan’s ears pinked and Quinlan had to swallow down a delighted laugh—she still blushed so easily! When they were Initiates, he’d had great fun making her go as red as possible.

Force, but he’d missed her far more than he’d realized.

They entered the galley, and Obi-Wan pointed and ordered him firmly to sit down as she rounded the table to the FA-unit’s station, powering it on with another jab of her finger. Then, as it got to work on Quinlan’s now-healed injuries, she sat across from him and said: “So, what do you want to know?”

Quinlan grinned at her. “Well…”

* * *

The _Alor’liit_ of Clan Grete was an older matronly woman that Quinlan couldn’t help but associate with Master Nu: grey-haired, stern, and in utter control of her domain. Quinlan was glad his only job was to stand behind the Duchess silently, because Master Nu had always kind of intimidated him and Cythre Grete had the same sort of weight of personality to her.

“You have Clan Grete’s _verde_ behind you, Tin’ika,” the _Alor’liit_ declared easily. “As Clan Kryze always does.”

The Duchess tapped a fist to the center of her chest, where the Iron Heart would be if she were wearing armor. A traditional Mandalorian gesture of gratitude and acknowledgement, from what Obi-Wan had told him in the quick-and-dirty Mando Manners lecture he’d begged off her. “As always, Clan Kryze is grateful for our _vode_ Clan Grete.”

And… That was that. They did not ask questions—though honestly Quinlan thought they should have, seeing as the Duchess was surrounded by Jedi and True Mandalorians; they had to at least be _curious_ even if they weren’t suspicious. The Duchess just talked a little longer with Cythre Grete about what she required of Clan Grete, the older woman just agreed to do whatever the Duchess wanted, and then they were back on the _Ori’Ramikad_.

They took off, entered hyperspace, and Quinlan was sitting with Obi-Wan in the cargo bay when he finally broke. “Right. I’m confused.”

Obi-Wan looked up from field-stripping a blaster. “Hm?”

It was just the two of them, since Osan and Tholme were having another of their cabals in the cockpit and the Duchess had given the veritable arsenal Obi-Wan had pulled out for maintenance a deeply disapproving look and made herself scarce. So Quinlan didn’t hesitate to voice his thoughts. “I expected more convincing to be needed. Clan Grete hadly had the full picture; their _Alor’liit_ didn’t even question our presence there. How could they have just agreed to whatever Duchess Satine asked?”

Obi-Wan sighed, setting aside the blaster. She frowned at the floor, the worn and oil-stained sheet she’d laid out as a work surface. “I don’t know very much about Clan Kryze and Grete’s internal affairs, but I know they have been allies for a very long time.”

“Same House?”

Obi-Wan shook her head. “Perhaps they were once, but they don’t use the terminology anymore, and the relationship has shifted a bit. Now it’s more to do with the duchy, and vassalage. In a House… well, traditional Mandalorian politics is a meritocracy. If you feel the head of the House isn’t doing a good job, you can challenge them for the position, or you can break from the House. But the duchy is the only Republic-acknowledged governing body of the Mandalore Sector, and you can’t challenge it or break from it. Or, well, you can, but you get labeled seditious or traitorous.”

“So Clan Grete, being deeply tied to Clan Kryze historically, has become deeply loyal to the duchy,” Quinlan extrapolated. “And being deeply loyal, they will not question the Duchess’s actions.”

“More or less. They are also one of the Clans supporting a culture shift toward Core values, and since the Duchy is also very pro-Core…”

Quinlan nodded thoughtfully, seeing the pieces start to connect. “Clan Grete has no reason, currently, to want to change the status quo. That is, they only benefit from the Kryze Duchy being in power.”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed. “They aren’t likely to rock the boat because they know the Kryze will give them what they want.”

“Mmn,” Quinlan said, watching as she picked up a gas conversion chamber and inspected it. “How likely is it that the rest of our stops are going to be this easy?”

Obi-Wan’s mouth twisted into something not quite a frown. “Depends on if Satine sticks to just New Mandalorians or if she’ll try to pull in some of the True Mandalorians or independent clans.”

“If she tries to keep to New Mandalorians, she won’t have enough support to take back Sundari,” said Osan, startling Quinlan who had not been paying enough attention to his surroundings to sense him coming. “So let’s hope she will open conversations with the others.”

“Death Watch really has so many members?” Quinlan asked, collecting himself. Osan rested his hand briefly on top of Obi-Wan’s head, a gesture of paternal affection that Obi-Wan leaned into like a flower turning to the sun.

“More than the New Mandalorians, at least,” Osan replied, turning his attention to Quinlan. “And a few of the New Mandalorian Clans don’t train their members as _verde_ anymore, so the number of combat-ready New Mandalorians is even lower.”

Quinlan frowned thoughtfully. “Does Clan Kryze?”

“Not anymore,” Obi-Wan responded. “Satine had a couple years of training, but she stopped at age eleven to train more intensively in diplomacy and politics.”

“She doesn’t…” Quinlan hesitated, a worry taking root in his mind. “Does she think she can solve this with diplomacy?”

Osan’s mouth twisted. “That’s the million-cred question, isn’t it? I’m not sure. She doesn’t want to discuss her plans with me.”

Death Watch was aggressively militant and intolerant of opposing ideologies. Quinlan had read up on some of their tenets and actions during their downtime, and been alarmed by what he saw. Death Watch believed the path toward rebuilding Mandalore was Imperialism, and asserting and maintaining their dominance through violence. They also believed that pacifism was indicative of a weak character and needed to be eradicated, whether by exile or by execution, before it ruined Mandalore. Preferably, it seemed, by execution.

“But Death Watch doesn’t want to find a diplomatic solution,” he said, concerned. “If she tries, they’ll just kill her.”

“Ah, but that’s what you and your Master are here for, right?” Osan asked wryly. Quinlan grimaced. His swagger was actually an affectation; training as a Shadow with Master Tholme kept him pretty humble. And he knew that two Jedi weren’t enough to face an army of angry Mandalorians. Void, the reports out of Galidraan proved that just _one_ properly-motivated Mando could take down half a dozen full Knights.

His thoughts must have been playing out on his face, because Osan patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, _Jet’ika_. Your Master and I have been trying to act as her advisors.”

The implication that the two older men were giving the Duchess tactical advice was moderately reassuring. He knew Master Tholme was clever and calculating, and Osan… Well, Osan was Mandalorian, which was its own type of qualification.

“I am glad the Duchess can rely on your help, as well as my Master’s,” Quinlan said, because he wasn’t a total slouch at being tactful.

“ _Buir_ , where are we heading next?” Obi-Wan wanted to know.

“Clan Durja on Esu’yaim,” Osan replied and added, with a glance at Quinlan, “A small clan. New Mandalorian.”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“About a day, so get comfortable.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the wait, but I definitely have not had the mental or emotional capacity to be creative for the last while. I am hoping that I can get the next chapter out in a more timely manner.
> 
> Comments that are character-bashing will be deleted. I'm not looking for the comments section to become a place of negativity, and I will take measures that it doesn't.


	6. Hitting a Snag

They were not attacked on the way to Esu’yaim, which was both surprising and not. Death Watch was almost certainly looking for them and the planet was closer to Mandalore than Atevalu was, but space was vast and Death Watch probably hadn’t quite set up a hunting net fine enough to catch them.

In any case, they were not attacked on the way to Esu’yaim. In fact, they were able to meet with Clan Durja and secure their alliance without mishap. It was when they were leaving Esu’yaim that things got dicey. They were just clearing atmo, flush with another successful alliance, when two _Beskad_ -class fighters came screaming down on them. The _Ori’ramikad_ banked sharply to avoid the ships’ strafing fire, but fortunately Osan had been firm in his insistence that everyone strap in for take-offs and landings. They got jostled, but nobody went tumbling around the compartments.

The Force pricked at Quinlan, little metaphysical needles in his brain that he couldn’t do anything about. He wished he was at least in the cockpit… 

They were hit, not bad, but enough that the ship lurched and alarms blared for a moment before being cut off. Quinlan semi-involuntarily reached out to Obi-Wan in the Force, needing to know what was happening. He felt her jolt of surprise at the press of his attention, a flicker of annoyance, then she opened her shields to him. His breath caught at the deluge of feelings and impressions that poured through the connection, sensing what was happening in the cockpit as clearly as if he was seeing it.

Obi-Wan trusted her adoptive father implicitly, her attention devoted to calculating their hyperdrive jump with the aid of the navicomputer, allowing Osan to pilot the _Ori’ramikad_ through the coordinated attacks of the two fighters without a twitch of concern. She believed wholeheartedly that nobody would do a better job piloting than him, that even her Force sensitivity couldn’t outweigh his experience and familiarity with their ship and space combat maneuvering. Feeling that belief soothed Quinlan a little, as did the cool discipline of her mind. She wasn’t afraid, she had work to do, and she wasn’t going to be distracted.

The navicomputer was done, the greenlight for hyperspace on. Osan put the _Ori’ramikad_ into such a tight, spiraling dive that the inertial dampers thrummed hard enough to vibrate the ship and it still wasn’t enough to keep Quinlan’s stomach from migrating to his throat. The _Beskads_ — _Beskade_ ?—were fast ships, but had terrible turning radii. They shot right over the _Ori’ramikad_ , unable to keep up with the sharp turns. Osan pulled the _Ori’ramikad_ out of the dive, leveling their flight enough so they could punch it into hyperspace, the stars smearing past the cockpit’s windows just as the _Beskade_ arced around to re-engage.

Quinlan huffed out a sigh of relief and pushed his admiration and affection for Obi-Wan at her through their connection. She flared with embarrassment shot through with pleasure, and promptly shoved him out of her mind, her shields snapping up as strong as ever. Quinlan laughed, opening his eyes to the arched brow of his Master and the confused frown of the Duchess. He refused to be embarrassed, so he just grinned and said: “We’re safely in hyperspace. Osan has some fancy tricks with this tub.”

“Our ship is not a _tub_ ,” Obi-Wan said tartly, glowering as she entered the galley. Quinlan just grinned wider, pleased by the flush glowing high on her cheeks. Her scowl deepened at his smug expression, but the edge of it was softened by the fairly obvious embarrassment in her body language.

“No, you’re right,” he admitted easily, wrestling himself out of the crash webbing, “she’s a beautiful bird, could’ve run laps around those fighters.”

Obi-Wan peered at him narrowly, suspicious, then huffed and crossed her arms. “You haven’t changed a bit, Quinlan Vos.”

“How can you improve on perfection?” he sallied back. He was, he reflected, maybe riding on a slight high. The adrenaline high of the escape and the emotional high of connecting so closely with her in the Force.

Obi-Wan rolled her eyes so hard he could almost hear it. She deliberately turned away from him to address Master Tholme and the Duchess. “I hope the rough flight didn’t bother you too much. I’m afraid that the longer we’re out here flying about the sector, the more run-ins we’ll have with Death Watch patrols, so this unfortunately won’t be the last time we’ll have to do some evasive maneuvers. But if you find it necessary, we do have some motion-sickness hypos in the ship’s medical supplies.”

“These old bones can take a little rough handling yet,” Master Tholme said calmly. He mostly tended to ignore Quinlan when he got like this, which was probably for the best.

“It was mildly alarming, but I shall be prepared should it occur again,” the Duchess said gamely. She looked a little wan, though, and Quinlan felt a little bad for her. Politicians were hardly trained for aerial battles. She probably felt like they’d left her stomach behind on Esu’yaim.

“We’ll make the hypos more accessible, in case you need them,” Obi-Wan said diplomatically. “Next time our maneuvering may be a little more extreme.”

The Duchess paled just a little more. “I see. I thank you for your care.”

“How long is our flight?” Quinlan asked.

“Three hours,” Master Tholme replied and cocked a bushy eyebrow at him. “Which we will spend in meditation, my young Padawan.”

Quinlan tried not to sigh. “Yes, Master. Do you want to join us, Obi?”

“No, I need to help _buir_ repair the ship.”

“Oh, right.” Quinlan had to admit he was disappointed. “Of course.”

“Come on, Padawan,” Master Tholme said, heavy hand falling on Quinlan’s shoulder to steer him away. Wry amusement filtered lightly through their bond, and Quinlan sulked a little. He knew he was acting like an akk pup around Obi-Wan, but Master Tholme didn’t need to laugh about it.

He sighed, let go of his disappointment and annoyance, and followed his Master back to the cargo bay and the little meditation area they’d set up there. Maybe Obi-Wan would join them next time.

* * *

Quinlan was jolted from his meditative trance by a pained ripple in the Force that left him mentally reeling, his heart galloping in his chest and his breath choked in his throat. He flinched hard, overbalancing and catching himself on his hands as he fell to his side, legs twisted under him. He looked around wildly, but the _Ori’ramikad_ seemed fine and their flight was still smooth with the easy hum of hyperspace.

“Master?” Tholme hadn’t reacted quite as violently as Quinlan to the disturbance, but he also wasn’t meditating anymore. He was hunting-still, though, and his gaze was grim and narrowed. “What was that?”

“I—” Master Tholme’s response was cut off by the chirp of his comm activating.

_“Jetii,”_ Osan’s voice said, terse and unhappy, “you need to come to the cockpit. Now.”

Master Tholme shared a glance with Quinlan, before they hustled to their feet and out of the cargo bay. Obi-Wan and the Duchess preceded them, coming out of the galley with furrowed brows.

“Did you feel that?” Quinlan asked Obi-Wan. She frowned.

“Yes… What was it?”

He only had time to shrug before they were cramming into the cockpit, five humans in a space meant really only for two. Osan and Tholme, as the largest, squished themselves as much into the seats as they could to make room for the rest. Osan looked more grim than Quinlan had ever seen him, a muscle in his jaw jumping as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.

“I initiated a sentry algorithm when we left Sundari, to scan the holonet for broadcasts in the Sector that could help us evade Death Watch,” Osan explained to start. “Things like communications, news reports, port activity data… For the most part, chatter has been about Sundari itself and a little about their patrol patterns. But this just pinged my system. It’s a live feed. From Esu’yaim.”

Quinlan had a bad feeling about this.

Osan met the Duchess’s worried gaze forthrightly. “Your Grace, this may be difficult for you to watch, but I feel you need to see it.”

The holoprojector flickered on, showing a view that Quinlan recognized: The large _karyai_ of the Durja Clan’s stronghold. Except the interior of the massive room was much changed from when they’d stood in it, just a couple hours earlier.

The tables and benches that had been arranged around the room were toppled and many were broken, the thick woven rugs covering the cool stone floors rucked up and askew. All forty-three members of Clan Durja knelt or lay in the middle of the chaos, a number of them clearly injured, the ones laying prone frighteningly still. And ringed around them, the darkly-armored figures of twenty Death Watch soldiers.

One in the front, seemingly the leader, was mid-sentence in a zealous rant. “—the pretty words of Core politicians, soft creatures who could never survive as we who have the fire of _manda_ in us have for centuries. There is a future for Mandalore, but one that does not require their weaknesses. Mandalore was once great, and that glory can be found again!”

_“Kote lo’shebs’ul’narit,”_ snarled the _Alor’liit_ of Clan Durja. “What has Death Watch done for Mandalore recently, besides killing Mando’ade who don’t agree with them?”

The spokesman took two long strides toward Pen Durja and backhanded him with a gauntleted fist across the face. The _Alor’liit_ rocked backward but kept his balance somehow, leaning back forward and derisively spitting blood at the feet of the Death Watch warrior.

The Duchess let out a choked whimper. Quinlan felt her distress radiating off her in the Force, but he couldn’t look away from the holocast.

“Silence, _hut’uun_ ,” snapped the warrior. “Fools like you weaken all of Mandalore. _Kyr’tsad_ would see us back in our rightful place, respected and feared by the galaxy.”

_“Vencuyot be’mando’ade nu kyr’am bat’kyrbej,”_ said Pen Durja, fairly hissing the words. Then he tossed his head proudly back and said in a ringing voice: _“MANDALORE SU’CUYI!”_

The Death Watch warrior jerked forward, hovering menacingly over the Durja leader. “ _Me’copaani?”_ he screamed, the vocoder of his helmet peaking out a little from his volume. _“Suum ca’nara? Gana!”_

And then he pulled his blaster and shot Pen Durja point-blank in the face.

There was a breath of shocked silence, as everyone struggled to process what had just occurred. Then one of the women of Clan Durja, traces of tears on her face and fury in her eyes, lifted her head to glare defiantly at the Death Watch soldiers surrounding her. _“Mandalore su’cuyi!”_

_“Mandalore su’cuyi!”_ shouted a young man from the crowd of kneeling Durja, his voice cracking mid-word. Other voices echoed him, until what seemed like the whole clan was chanting the words. The twenty Death Watch soldiers shouted back at them, orders to stop, angry rebuttals, insults.

The chanting didn’t stop.

Not until the shooting started.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember folks, please don't character bash in the comments. Not everyone will share your opinion and I don't want to be moderating comment fights.


	7. Plan of Attack

“There is no room for weakness in Mandalore’s future.” The Death Watch warrior’s closing words rang in the silence that followed the last shot, and the feed cut off to leave the sector reeling. Quinlan’s nerves jangled with the horrible knowledge that an entire clan of people had just been massacred on live holocast and with the ripples their violent deaths had caused in the Force. So this was what it had been warning them about.

“What… what were they saying?” he asked.

“Mandalore lives,” Osan said, quiet and grim. The Duchess made a terrible noise, choked in the back of her throat, and when Quinlan glanced back at her, her face was absolutely bloodless. Horror and guilt and grief radiated off of her, and he winced as they lapped like acid at his shields.

“Obi-Wan,” Osan ordered. Obi seemed to understand what he wanted, because she gently but implacably pulled the Duchess from the cockpit, murmuring quietly to the stricken noble.

“There were no children,” Master Tholme said, leaning forward to tap the holoprojector controls. A still of the beginning of the ‘cast flickered up; Osan must have recorded it as it broadcasted.

“What?” Osan demanded, head snapping around to pin Master Tholme with a sharp stare.

“There were no children in the  _ karyai _ ,” Tholme repeated himself calmly, scrolling through the footage frame by frame. It looked to have been sent from a helmet cam, moving like a sightline rather than like a hand-held holorecorder. There was about a minute of footage that they’d missed before joining Osan in the cockpit; he must have called them up immediately on realizing what the holocast was.

The helmet cam scanned the  _ karyai  _ briefly before focusing on the spokesman and going still. Master Tholme fast-fowarded through the zealot’s “speech” until the shooting started, then slowed once more, scanning through the terrible footage frame by frame. The mando whose helmet they were seeing through moved slightly, prowling as they fired along with their Death Watch compatriots into the crowd of Durja clanmembers.

Though watching turned his stomach, Quinlan kept his eyes peeled, and he had to admit Master Tholme was right. The oldest Durja he could see in the holocast looked to be around his own age, an adult in Mandalorian tradition. “But there were five younglings when we were there. If they didn’t kill them, what did they do with them? Do you think the younglings hid?”

Osan cursed. “No,  _ haar’chak, _ it’s a common tactic. Death Watch takes young children and trains them up themselves. Indoctrinates them, I should say. It’s how they keep their numbers up.”

“Then, they’ve got the kids somewhere. Should we try to go back and free them?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that would be wise,” Tholme replied, resting a hand on Quinlan’s shoulder. “We don’t know if they’ve moved the younglings off of Esu’yaim, and we can’t risk getting the Duchess captured. The best thing we can do for those younglings right now is finish our mission. Once Death Watch’s power has been broken, it will make it easier to retrieve them.”

“I don’t like the thought of leaving kids with those  _ chakaare _ ,” Osan said, “but you’re right,  _ jetii _ . We don’t have the option to get them back right now. But we need to warn the clans we visit about what happened; they’ll need to take precautions.”

“We need to warn  _ everyone _ ,” said the Duchess from the doorway, causing them all to turn to look. Her face was still pale and the skin around her eyes was reddened, ostensibly from scrubbing away tears. But her back was straight and her head held high. Obi-Wan hovered worriedly behind her. “I want to record another message. Mandalore should hear my response to the atrocity Death Watch just committed.”

“That’s true enough,” Osan sighed. “Though you should know that we’d have to broadcast it directly from the ship, instead of uploading it to a satellite network to broadcast while we’re making our getaway. That means Death Watch will be able to track us through it as long as we’re broadcasting.”

“Then I shall have to speak quickly,” she replied, unfazed. There was a brief silence as they all considered the effects the action would have.

“We’ll need a new ship,” Master Tholme said. “They already know what it looks like, and they’ll be able to get a lock on our transponder through the broadcast.”

Obi-Wan made a small sound of distress, but Osan was nodding reluctantly. “I don’t like it, but you’re right. Staying with the  _ Ori’ramikad  _ is too much of a risk. But we can’t get a new ship just anywhere. At least, not in-sector. The shipyards on Taris would be our best bet; they’re large and busy. No one will remark on our presence and it’ll be easy to find a buyer and a seller.”

“But we’d have to leave the Mandalore Sector,” the Duchess objected.

“Our other options are to either trade with a friendly clan, which leaves them to be found with the ship Death Watch is looking for, or to try to steal something from the MandalMotors shipyards,” Obi-Wan pointed out quietly. She didn’t even have to say how bad those choices were. The Duchess grimaced and nodded.

“I see. How long would a trip to Taris take?”

“Two days round trip, if we’re lucky and sell our ship quickly, and find a new one to buy quickly as well,” Osan said.

“Can we afford the delay? Death Watch is killing anyone who resists them; I’m worried that two days when we’re not rallying clans is two days my people have to wait for help.”

“We could split up,” Quinlan offered. Everyone turned to stare at him. “What? It’d make sense. Someone can drop us and the Duchess off at our next location then head to Taris as we negotiate the next alliance.”

“It’s not a terrible idea,” Osan muttered, but he sounded dubious.

“None of these are good choices, but this may be the best,” Master Tholme agreed.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Obi-Wan said.

* * *

The cockpit was only large enough to allow two others to remain as the Duchess gave her holocast address; any more and they would have to stand in the pickup cone for the holorecorder, which wasn’t desirable. So Obi-Wan and Quinlan huddled in the galley to watch the ’cast on Obi-Wan’s handheld holoprojector. The Duchess sat straight-backed and stern in the pilot’s chair in front of the holorecorder, staring forthrightly into the pickup lens and giving the impression that she was speaking to the viewer directly.

_ “Su cuy’gar _ ,  _ Mando’ade,”  _ she said. “I am the Heir Presumptive to the Duchy of Mandalore, Satine Kryze. I speak to you now in a time of grave peril to our people. I expect recordings of Death Watch’s attack on Clan Durja have been shared widely across the Mandalore Sector by now. This is just another heinous act by these  _ demagolkase _ . Death Watch claims to desire a strong Mandalore, but their actions bely that wish. They have long demonstrated that they do not value their fellow  _ Mando’ade _ , spending the lives of both their own people and any  _ Mando’ade  _ who disagree with them without qualm. They bleed Mandalore of its true strength: its people.

“My father, the late Duke Adonai Kryze was the  _ alor’liit  _ of Clan Kryze for twenty years before his recent murder at the hands of Death Watch. In the early years of his leadership, he led Clan Kryze much as every  _ alor’liit  _ had at the time, as a warlord. But as time passed and he led his clan in battle after skirmish after war, he began to notice a disturbing trend. And, when he checked with Kryze’s ally-clans, he realized a grim truth. That truth is this: Mandalore is dying. Slowly, cut by cut, we are dying, bleeding to death. The only reason we are not already merely a memory is our tradition of adoption, but that is not a cure, it has only delayed the end. Too many  _ verde _ die each year, they die too young, and the birthrate is too low to replace them. Adoption is a transfusion, but it is little help since those adoptees fall victim to the same trend. Our people die in many ways, but the reasons they die can all be traced back to the philosophy of  _ kote bal kyr’am _ that has lingered in our society since the days of the Mandalorian Empire.” Her head dipped briefly before rising again, passion rouging her cheeks. “My father saw this and, together with some of our allies, determined to form the New Mandalorian movement. The old ways are not working. It is time to try something else.”

The Duchess made a sharp gesture, a power and an energy to her voice and her bearing that had even Quinlan sitting up straighter. “Mandalore does not need more warriors, it needs farmers, engineers, doctors, teachers. Mandalore doesn’t need more wars, it needs rebuilding. Mandalore doesn’t need you to die for its glory, it needs you to live for its future!”

Her chin lifted and there was fire in her eyes. “The path of Death Watch is a dead-end. We must choose life.  _ Mandalore su’cuyi!” _

The holocast ended.

Quinlan and Obi-Wan sat in silence for a moment before Quinlan let out a low whistle. “Damn.”

“That’ll stir up the gundarks’ nest,” Obi-Wan said, but didn’t seem particularly disturbed at the thought. Rather, she looked pleased and a little proud.

“I’ll say it will,” Quinlan said dryly, and eyed her. “Was that all true? What she said?”

Obi-Wan grimaced. “Yes, more or less. So many of the smaller clans are all but extinct, and even the larger clans are a fraction of what they used to be.”

“And Death Watch going around causing massacres isn’t helping,” Quinlan said. “Do they know?”

“It’s hard to say,” Obi-Wan said. “The clans can be… reluctant to report their numbers and any information about their members, so it’s not like we have a reliable census. It took years for Duke Kryze to put things together. My  _ ba’vodu _ , my uncle, he only recently put the data together. And Death Watch has its own propaganda machine, part of which has been steadily silencing any thoughts that might go against the old codes.”

“Don’t you follow the old codes?” Quinlan wasn’t trying to be contrary; he was legitimately curious, ignorant of a lot of the nuances of Mandalorian culture.

“From a certain point of view,” she replied. “It rather depends on what you consider ‘the old codes’. The  _ Resol’nare  _ are the only established code from the ancient Mandalorians, but there are many interpretations of the tenets, and not all of them agree. The  _ Resol’nare  _ say simply: Education and armor, self-defense, our clan, our language, our leader—all help us survive. What exactly is meant by self-defense? Death Watch thinks it means preemptively striking at anyone that might be a threat. Satine thinks that self-defense includes avoiding unnecessary conflict through diplomacy. Either could be true, because the tenets are not specific.”

“I see,” Quinlan said thoughtfully. Again, there were similarities between the Mandalorians and Jedi; philosophical debates about the Jedi Code were a perennial event in the Temple.

Obi-Wan stood, tucking her handheld into a pouch at her waist. “We should probably prepare. There’s a lot to do before we drop at Gettuuk.”

Quinlan nodded. “Master Tholme wanted to talk to us beforehand, too.”

* * *

Obi-Wan, Quinlan, and the Duchess sat in a cantina in the town closest to the clan compounds of Feldu and Ordo’tayl clans on the planet of Gettuuk. It was a green planet, but boasted a volatile atmosphere that regularly sent destructive storms rampaging across its surface. This, paired with some aggressive native wildlife, meant that Gettuuk had been mostly passed over for settlement when there were still more attractive planets such as Mandalore to be had. With the destruction of Mandalore’s environment, however, many of the clans that had called it home had migrated to Gettuuk. The Feldu and Ordo’tayl clans were sympathetic to the New Mandalorians, but other clans on the planet were not, so prior to dropping the three teens off, Master Tholme had helped them disguise themselves.

Both Obi-Wan and the Duchess had been turned into brunettes, and the Duchess was wearing a mishmash of Obi-Wan and Osan’s spare clothes which made her look distinctly less like a prim-and-proper noble. Obi-Wan’s armor had gotten a very hasty and perfunctory re-paint, since apparently the paint colors and design could be as good as a fingerprint for identifying mandos. For his part, Quinlan’s  _ qukuuf  _ had been subtly altered with clever application of a special make-up paste that mimicked the ritualistic Kiffar tattoos. He was still wearing the simple, nondescript clothes he had been since the beginning of this whole mission, with his lightsaber carefully tucked into the hidden pocket. Their disguises wouldn’t work if anyone looked close enough and knew what the Duchess’s face looked like, but their resources had been limited on the  _ Ori’ramikad _ and this was as good as it got. It would probably work as long as they were careful not to draw too much attention to themselves.

“Are you sure I can’t get you kids anything to eat?” asked the cantina server as she approached their table with the drinks they’d ordered. Something called  _ chiruir _ , a milky, mildly sweet drink, on Obi-Wan and the Duchess’s advice.

“No, thanks, we’re just waiting for my uncle,” the Duchess said. Quinlan marveled again at her perfect mando accent, which she seemed to be able to turn on and off like flipping a switch. The first time the nasally, clipped cadence had come out of her mouth, Quinlan had almost choked on his own spit. She’d given him a very arch look. He didn’t react now; he was a Shadow padawan, thanks, he knew how to maintain cover.

The server left again, and Quinlan leaned forward to snag one of the cups, dragging it back to the edge of the table so he could slouch back with the insouciant disregard of a cocksure young male. Obi-Wan mentally poked him with the impression of rolled eyes. He slung an arm across the back of her chair. He was  _ playing a part _ , it was called  _ acting _ , Obi-Wan.

She poked him a little harder.

He sipped his  _ chiruir _ . It was good, kind of like tea with a lot of milk and a little sugar. He took another drink, deeper this time. “So, how long will we be waiting?”

“Uncle Bozhi got my message, so he should be here soon,” the Duchess replied, maintaining her mando accent. Quinlan wondered if it was her real accent, and the posh Core one she’d had up until now was the affectation. It was honestly really hard to tell.

He gulped down the rest of his drink, then pointed at Obi-Wan’s cup. “You gonna finish that?”

She gave him a highly offended look, immediately pulling it closer to her. Of course, it was tea. Never get between Obi-Wan and tea. Quinlan shrugged and shifted around, digging in his pocket. “Hey, while we’re waiting, who wants to play sabacc?”

The Duchess gave him a very dark look. “How can you be so…” she struggled to find a word. Quinlan lifted his eyebrows. 

“I think the better question would be: Why are you so down in the dumps,  _ Sarai _ ?” He stressed her codename, trying to make her understand. Sarai’s father had not been assassinated. Sarai was not on the run with a motley crew of mandos and Jedi. Sarai was just here to visit her uncle with two of her friends.

A few emotions chased across her face, then she hid behind her cup, deliberately taking her time sipping the  _ chiruir _ to give herself a chance to compose herself. Finally she set down the cup, expression resigned. “Oh fine. Deal us in.”

Quinlan beamed. “Now we’re talking! We have anything to bet?”

Obi-Wan sighed.


	8. Two Steps Back

“We’ve seen what happens to allies of Clan Kryze,” Pyllor Ordo’tayl said through an impressive scowl. His brother, the Duchess’s ‘Uncle Bozhi’, stood beside him, arms crossed and body language closed off. “Why should we lay our lives on the line for you when you abandoned Clan Durja?”

 _‘You know, considering she called him uncle, I really thought that this would be a more amiable discussion,’_ Quinlan directed the thought toward Obi-Wan though he wasn’t sure it would get through her shields. She shifted uncomfortably, flicking a glance at him. _‘So you_ can _hear me. That’s good. So, do we have a plan to get out of here?’_

“Interesting that you would call it abandonment,” the Duchess replied stiffly. “Our mission was to gain a verbal contract of alliance from Durja and having done so, we left to continue securing other Clan alliances. Why would we remain at Clan Durja? And who would think that Death Watch would even bother to stop on Esu’yaim when _I_ am their main target?”

“You can’t be so naive to think they wouldn’t respond to your gathering of power,” Pyllor said. Quinlan watched the Duchess’s nostrils flare with her temper though the rest of her bearing remained impassive.

“What would you have had me do, then?” she asked, sharp. “Make a lone stand against Death Watch? That would have been _jare'la_. I cannot stop them on my own, I need allies, and so here I am, making allies.”

 _‘If only,’_ Quinlan thought bleakly. The Ordo’tayl brothers looked unconvinced, scowling and snapping. No, Quinlan didn’t think they’d be making any allies here. But if they were lucky, they also wouldn’t make any new enemies.

“We can’t risk our people for so little promise,” Pyllor said, a note of finality in his voice. Satine stands tall and still for a moment before giving a curt nod.

“You condemn them for far less,” she said, but it isn’t vindictive, isn’t cruel. Her words are weary, instead. Regretful.

“We will see,” Pyllor said and leaned back. “We won’t help you, but neither will we obstruct you. Leave freely.”

It was a dismissal with no room for argument. Left no other option, the Duchess tapped her chest in traditional farewell and turned away. Quinlan and Obi-Wan—stiff with tension on Satine’s other side—followed. They were seen out of the Ordo’tayl compound briskly and curtly by two stern-faced _verde_ . None of them spoke; the _verde_ simply showed them to the door, dipped their chins briefly in acknowledgement, and closed the door behind them.

Standing back out in the thick, humid air of the planet, Quinlan coughed lightly. “So, ah, what now?”

The Duchess sighed. “Now we move on to the next clan.”

Quinlan considered her as they moved away from Ordo’tayl land. “How much of a set back is it, that they wouldn’t ally themselves with us?”

“That depends on how the rest of our meetings go,” she replied tersely.

“Have you been in contact with Clan Feldu?” Obi-Wan asked. She seemed on-edge, a faint frown creasing her brow, her eyes restlessly moving around their surroundings.

“Not yet...”

“Is something wrong?” Quinlan asked.

“I…” Obi-Wan’s frown deepened. “Can’t you sense it? There’s something… a disturbance in the Force.”

Quinlan frowned, too, and reached for the Force. He couldn’t say he was really feeling any disturbances, but Obi-Wan’s connection with the Force was different from his own. _Oh_ . His eyes narrowed. _What is that?_

“I sense it, too, now,” he said. It was faint, but there. A vague pulse of danger. “Let’s move. Sarai, contact Feldu.”

The Duchess nodded, a thread of worry creeping into her expression as both of her Force-sensitive companions’ demeanors became tense and wary. She keyed in her Feldu contact’s information into her comm, and started speaking quietly in mando’a when it connected. Quinlan drifted closer to Obi-Wan.

“I’m just getting a vague warning. You were always more connected to the cosmic Force; can you get anything more specific?” he kept his voice low.

“No, it’s… I just… have a very bad feeling.”

“ _Vor entye_ , Izza,” the Duchess said, voice becoming marginally louder as she turned back toward them. “ _Saar’urcye mhi._ ”

She cut the connection and lowered her wrist, eyeing them. “Alright, what now?”

“We move,” Obi-Wan said, in a tone that did not invite discussion. “Let’s go.”

They did, partly because if they didn’t, Obi-Wan would have left them behind as she marched full-stride into the thick vegetation. She was not kidding around, and really Quinlan could understand why. He knew how insistent the Force could be, even if it wasn’t him whom it was needling this time.

It was a pity Ordo’tayl didn’t want anything to do with them, if only because it would have been nice to catch a ride on one of their speeders. Their clan compound was in the middle of nowhere, hidden in Gettuuk’s wild woods and half-underground like the rest of the planet’s structures. Getting anywhere from here was going to be a pain in the ass, and likely take far longer than any of them would really prefer.

At least the Force would help them avoid the more murderous wildlife. Quinlan was pretty sure he could sense a rancor out to the south somewhere…

“What’s going on? Is there something out there?” the Duchess asked him, grimacing as she almost tripped over a gnarled root. Quinlan blinked at her for a moment, surprised she was asking him and not Obi-Wan.

“Uh, not exactly,” he replied. “The Force feels… unsettled, but we can’t really tell what it’s warning us about. It could be multiple things, and that’s why it’s hazy. Or it could be that something bad _might_ happen, but the chance of that isn’t high.”

She frowned, looking forward at Obi-Wan’s tensed shoulders. “All this for a vague unease?”

“She’s always had these kinds of feelings,” Quinlan said, feeling the need to defend his friend and fellow Force-sensitive. “And she’s usually right about them. Saved our butts a few times when we were younglings.”

“I see,” the Duchess said, in a tone that did not convince Quinlan she did.

“It’s hard to explain,” Quinlan shrugged. “It’s kind of… intention influences the Force, and we can feel that influence. We can sense what is possible, and the more likely a thing is to happen, the louder it is in the Force.”

“You can sense the future?”

“Why does everyone ask that?” Quinlan asked one of the rust-red trees they were passing. Then, to the Duchess: “No. We can sense possibilities. Sometimes those possibilities are so probable that it _seems_ like we know the future, but we can never be sure if something is truly going to come to pass. It takes a lot of practice and experience to get a sense for what is probable and what’s only possible. And it depends on an individual Jedi’s connection to the Force. It doesn’t speak to us all in the same way.”

The Duchess hummed, a thoughtful frown creasing her forehead. “I… Forgive me, but many of the records publicly available regarding the Jedi are rather...vague about your abilities. Or, if they aren’t, they make you sound like deities.”

Quinlan snorted. “Yeah, I bet. It’s a little intentional, on our part. There might not be Sith anymore, but the paranoia from those times is alive and well.”

“The stories of the Sith are formidable,” the Duchess said, very carefully. Quinlan laughed.

“So diplomatic,” he said. “You don’t need to tiptoe around it; we’re all aware of Mandalorian-Jedi history.”

Her face pinked, just a little. “I—”

“Don’t worry about diplomacy with ‘Tabin’,” Obi-Wan said ahead of them, displaying some fine Jedi paranoia and using his alias just as Quinlan was using theirs. “In fact, the more bluntly you speak, the better. He has a thick skull.”

“Brat,” Quinlan said, making a face at her when she smirked back over her shoulder at him. “But I don’t know if you have room to talk, Beskar-head.”

He reached forward to ping a nail off the helmet hanging from her belt. Obi-Wan squawked in offense, twitching out of reach. The Duchess watched with a slight smile; it faded slightly, though. “What is it about the Sith that makes them such enemies to you and yours? Surely you could have found a compromise, rather than waging a war of extermination?”

Quinlan and Obi-Wan sobered. “No,” Quinlan said. “No, I don’t think we could have. Perhaps if they were only Darkside-users, but true Sith? No.”

“What’s the difference?” the Duchess asked, incomprehension clear on her face.

“Darksiders simply use the Dark Side of the Force,” Obi-Wan took up the explanation. “Whereas Sith… Darken the Force. That probably doesn’t mean a whole lot to you, as you aren’t Sensitive and don’t have a sense for what I mean. Hm… how do I describe it? The Force is an energy field that’s generated by living things, anything from the smallest microbe to the largest animal. It suffuses and permeates the Galaxy, and all things within it.”

“It flows between all things, connecting us,” Quinlan motioned between the three of them, “and connecting each of us to this tree, that rock, every bird in the air and insect in the ground.”

“Some creatures are Force Sensitive, can sense and touch that energy field between all things. Some of those creatures aren’t sentient, and they channel the Force passively. Sentient creatures that can use the Force can also influence the Force,” Obi-Wan continued. “The Jedi philosophy, and most of the other Force-user philosophies, hold that we should live in harmony with it; we should only take what it willingly gives us and we should strive to create as few metaphorical ripples in the stream of the Force as possible. Generally, that is accomplished by preserving life, which is the font of the Force, and drawing from the Light side of the Force, which requires calmness to access. In contrast, the Darksiders believe the Force is power for the taking, if one is bold enough. They use strong emotions, like hate, anger, or passion to pull from the Force, bending it to their will—”

“That’s why Darksiders always seem more powerful than Jedi,” Quinlan puts in. “Darksiders are more willing to _take_ from the Force, while Jedi and those who are Light-aligned will only ask.”

“And the Sith take that one step further,” Obi-Wan said grimly. “Their power comes from creating chaos and disruption. Pain and suffering creates a tumult in the Force, Darkens it, and they feed on that chaos. It makes it easier for them to rip power from the natural flow. Where Sith go, they bring suffering, without exception.”

The Duchess’s brow was furrowed as she parsed the explanation. “If being a Sith is down to actions, surely there’s a way to persuade them to stop.”

Quinlan grimaced, the ‘no’ on the tip of his tongue, but Obi-Wan spoke first. “Perhaps. There are legends of redeemed Sith, though the veracity of those stories isn’t clear. But I think the more important question is: what is the cost of giving them second chances? Perhaps we could persuade a Sith to atone, but how many lives will be lost in the attempt? A Sith isn’t just going to sit down and listen to a Jedi debate them; all while the attempt is made, there will be resistance. Violent, lethal resistance. What makes that Sith life more valuable than the lives of their victims?”

Quinlan stared at her for a moment, struck by the response.

“What if they could be imprisoned?” the Duchess persisted.

“How?” Obi-Wan asked simply.

“If they were subdued in a fight, rather than killed—”  
“Fighting to subdue someone who is trying to kill you requires you to be a much better fighter than them, if you want to win,” Quinlan interrupted. “And Sith do not fight fairly. There are terrible stories about what they could do with the Force.”

“Aren’t there Force-suppressing bindings and drugs?”

Obi-Wan flinched minutely; Quinlan only noticed because there was a flicker of remembered terror in the Force that rippled out from her as well. He glanced over, but she had carefully composed her face. Her voice was flat. “Yes. There are. Is it better to subject them to torture than to simply kill them?”

“Torture?” the Duchess repeated, eyes widening. Obi-Wan stayed silent a little too long, so Quinlan awkwardly answered:

“Cutting off a Force Sensitive from the Force is…” he hesitated, eyeing Obi-Wan’s stone-still expression. Osan had said he’d found her on a slave ship with a collar around her neck… He cleared his throat, uncomfortable. “It’s not too bad for a short time, but the longer their connection to the Force is blocked, the more it begins to affect them. It _is_ torture.”

“Force-sensitive slaves are worth a lot, but they’re also difficult to keep,” Obi-Wan said, still in that dead tone. She met and held the Duchess’s gaze. “The suicide rate is eighty-percent.”

Horror washed across the Duchess’s face, and her stride faltered. “O-oh.”

Obi-Wan grunted, head turning forward again, her posture and stride putting a rather firm end to the conversation. They walked in silence the rest of the way.

* * *

It wasn’t the same small settlement as the one in which they’d met Bozhi Ordo’tayl (that one lay in the opposite direction), but it looked very similar. The two little towns had probably been established at the same time, using the same pre-fab building components. Their layout was very similar, too, so it took little effort to find the cantina. The chance to sit and get something to drink and eat was entirely too enticing; they’d been walking for hours with just the emergency water rations they’d tried to dip into only sparingly.

The Force was still whispering warnings, so they kept their heads down and quietly went for one of the tables half-tucked behind the building’s large support pillars. The cantina was fairly empty, only a couple other patrons who all seemed content to mind their own business. Still, Quinlan didn’t let himself relax his guard, alert and fully aware of his surroundings even as he slipped into the seat with a sigh. Obi-Wan and the Duchess echoed that sigh as they sank into their own seats. He was glad they’d given the Duchess a pair of sturdy, sensible boots because the heeled things she’d been wearing as a part of her regalia would have killed her feet walking for five hours straight. Especially through a jungle.

Obi-Wan caught the eye of the server and gave some little sign, because the Togrutan started pulling out glasses and pouring something fizzy into them. Quinlan stretched, popping his spine with a grunt. “So, how much further is it?”

“A couple hours,” the Duchess said, making a face at him. “Must you do that?”

“It’s already getting dark,” Obi-Wan murmured. “And the larger predators come out at night. Do you think we can make it if we hurry?”

The Duchess made a skeptical sound, but held off on answering as the Togrutan server arrived with the drinks. Obi-Wan thanked him in mando’a, passing over some creds. Quinlan lifted his cup to his mouth as the server walked away, only to freeze with it at his lips as the Force suddenly wrenched at him in warning. At the same time, the cantina’s door hissed open and Obi-Wan glanced up at whoever entered. Quinlan could feel her very deliberately not reacting, though he saw her hand twitch slightly on her own cup. Their eyes met. He knew what she was going to say even before she said it.

It was barely a whisper, but sharp alarm rippled through the Force in its wake: “Death Watch.”


	9. Hard Contact

“Don’t react,” Quinlan said quickly, even as the Duchess stiffened in alarm. 

“Relax,” Obi-Wan said, quiet but not furtive. Her hand disappeared under the table, presumably to grip the Duchess’s leg and keep her in her seat. “We don’t want to draw their attention by acting nervous or scared.”

“But—”

“They’re not here for us,” Quinlan said, feeling the truth of it in the Force. The fact that they weren’t dodging blaster bolts also implied this was a chance occurrence. “If we pretend we’re just nobodies here for a drink, they won’t pay us any mind.”

“They’re sitting at the bar,” Obi-Wan reported, voice calm. She didn’t let her gaze linger on them, hiding her tension well, though Quinlan could still sense it in the Force. “Tabin is right, they aren’t here for us.”

“So what do we do?” the Duchess asked. She did not look reassured, but was making an effort to relax.

“We sit here calmly and drink our fizzers and then we calmly get up and walk out, like we do this every day and nothing is strange or alarming about it,” Quinlan said, dry. She scowled at him mildly.

“Oh yes, because it’s that easy.”

“Hopefully, yes.”

“An argument is not exactly low-key,” Obi-Wan said pointedly.

“Ah, you always ruin all my fun,” Quinlan sighed. Obi-Wan, who must have been very aware of how visible her face was to the group of Death Watch soldiers now drinking at the bar, stuck her tongue out at him. Quinlan laughed, a carefully modulated noise; he didn’t want to attract attention, but also wanted them to seem like a perfectly normal, at ease group of teenagers. It was a precarious balance, but Master Tholme was one of the best Shadows and Quinlan was an attentive pupil.

“Why can’t we wait for them to leave?” the Duchess asked. “Then we don’t have to walk by them.”

“We have no idea how long they’ll stay. And we can’t just sit here not eating or drinking, the barkeep will kick us out. So we’d have to keep drinking fizzers and ordering more, and I don’t have unlimited credits,” Obi-Wan replied. “There is risk in walking by them, of course, but it’s a one-time risk rather than the continual and increasing risk of remaining in the same room as them.”

“I see…”

“If we walk in a cluster with Benna and I between them and you, it’s unlikely they’ll get enough of a look at you to recognize you. Especially not with the disguise.”

She looked unconvinced. “You’ve only changed my hair color and my clothes. Hardly a disguise.”

Quinlan shrugged. “You’d be surprised how often it works. They’re expecting a blonde, so when they see brunette, they don’t look as closely at the face under the hair.”

She gave a very un-Duchess-like grunt of skepticism.

“It was all we could manage with what we had, anyway,” Obi-Wan murmured. “So it doesn’t do any good to argue about it now.”

_ Poor Obi-Wan, _ Quinlan reflected,  _ she’s stuck with two people whose first instinct is to argue. _ It would be more amusing if she wasn’t right. He did like pushing people further into their arguments and convictions than they had ever gone, and the Duchess was particularly easy to bait into it. But now wasn’t really the time.

He drank more of his fizzer, and turned their discussion to the more benign topic of bolo-ball, the most popular sport in the galaxy, which Mandos called  _ meshgeroya  _ and were inordinately fond of. The Duchess was no exception, though her favorite team was of course the Rylothian club, the galactic league’s perennial underdogs. They chatted for a while, valiantly attempting to seem calm and as un-fugitive-like as possible. If their voices were slightly strained, well, none of the Death Watch soldiers were close enough to really hear.

Eventually, their glasses were empty and the Duchess’s anxiety was beginning to get the better of her, her hands fidgeting with the empty glass in a tell Quinlan never would have guessed she’d have, as a born and bred politician.

He shared a look with Obi-Wan, who nodded and leaned into the Duchess’s shoulder to murmur quietly in her ear. She leaned into Obi-Wan unconsciously, orienting toward her like a flower toward the sun.

Quinlan cleared his throat quietly and stood up.  _ Mind in the moment _ , he told himself. The girls stood too, Obi-Wan slipping her helmet over her head and her arm around the Duchess’s shoulders. It was good thinking; her arm, bulked up slightly with armor, blocked some of the Duchess’s face from view.

They walked (in varying states of calmness) toward the door, passing behind the four terrorists lounging at the bar. Despite using some low-key meditative breathing and muscle-relaxing techniques, Quinlan’s heartrate still picked up a little as they strolled by.

But… nothing happened.

The soldiers kept drinking, barely even glancing in their direction, and their trio just… calmly walked to the door. Quinlan reached out to trigger the control panel, feeling the hair on the back of his neck prickle as he turned his back on the Death Watch troops. But there was no shout from behind. No whine of a blaster charging.

_ Force, we might actually make it out of this _ , Quinlan thought, as the door panel gave a soft chirp of acknowledgement.

Honestly, he should have known better.

The door slid open, and he found himself staring at a broad, armored chest. The jagged symbol of Death Watch, like a trill written with angry violent slashes, glared at him from the cuirass and when his eyes slowly rose (as the dread in his heart slowly rose), the imposing opaque T-shaped visor of a Mandalorian  _ buy’ce  _ glared down at him as well. He froze. The whole galaxy froze for one terrible moment, sharp with horror, as the Death Watch soldier in the doorway stared the three of them straight in the face.

Quinlan knew exactly when the giant wall of a Mando realized why Satine looked so familiar. The Force, which had been slowly spinning itself into a tornado of alarm, suddenly shrieked, an almost physical push for Quinlan to move.

_ ‘RUN!’  _ he shouted as loud as he could in the Force, hoping Obi-Wan would hear it through her shields, and at the same time he threw himself forward. He crashed bodily into the soldier, deliberately tangling their legs together so that when the Mando tried to step back and regain his balance, he tripped and fell backwards instead, all of Quinlan’s weight landing on his chest. Quinlan scrambled to get up and running—he could hear Obi-Wan and Satine already booking it—but still took the half second it required to twist the Mando’s helmet around on his head, effectively blinding him. He’d felt the man’s breath get knocked out of him with their landing, but wanted a little extra insurance.

He heard the gritty dirt of the planet’s loamy soil scatter behind him as he staggered up and into a full-out sprint. There was shouting behind him now, the Death Watch soldiers who’d been in the bar recovering from the sudden interruption of their night out and realizing their compatriot was down. Any second now, the felled Mando would tell them what he’d seen, and they’d start a hunt.

Obi-Wan was leading Satine in a zig-zagging path through the town’s pre-fab buildings, heading for the forest on the other side of the settlement. Quinlan followed the path as the Force revealed it to him, and soon caught up to the two girls. Satine was clearly not used to running like this, though she was trying her best, so they weren’t moving as quickly as he could. As he came abreast of them, he caught up her free hand, clutching it as Obi-Wan was on her other side. Together, they fairly dragged Satine along, occasionally using the Force to keep her upright when her feet stumbled.

Quinlan heard a jetpack fire a mere fraction of a second before the Force warning prickled along the back of his neck.

“Down!” he snapped, dropping to the ground himself and half-yanking Satine down by their clasped hands. Obi-Wan dropped at almost the exact same time, so they all three of them hit the dirt with a solid thump, as blasterfire streaked over their heads. “Kriff!”

Obi-Wan rolled, twin blaster pistols appearing in her hands as she rose on one knee, sighting back at their pursuers. Quinlan allowed himself one half-second to regret not having his lightsaber—he’d agreed with Tholme that they shouldn’t carry anything that could identify them—and yanked his blaster from the holster at his hip.

“Take her and go!” Obi-Wan told him, “I’ll try to distract them so you can get away!”

“The kriff we’re going to leave you!” he snapped back. They ducked again as more blasterfire came streaking toward them; five mandos in Death Watch grey-and-blue spread out, a couple on rooftops, to keep them pinned down.

“Dank farrik!” Obi-Wan snarled, squeezing off a few shots. “ _ Go! _ Before they box us in!”

“We’re not leaving you,” Satine retorted, flinching at the blasterfire’s sound and light. “Besides, we’d be shot before we got five steps!”

Obi-Wan swore some more, making mental eyebrows raise in a distant corner of Quinlan’s mind—the rest of him was too busy trying to shoot back at the soldiers to remark upon how different that was from the hide-bound Initiate Kenobi he’d grown up with. “Alright. Alright, I have some grav charges on my belt. I’ll set them off and you two can make a break for the forest.”

“No way you can throw them far enough to reach them without using the Force,” Quinlan said. “And we really shouldn’t use the Force, not that obviously.”

“I don’t have to hit them, I just have to blow enough dirt and smoke into the air to decrease visibility, give you the chance to run.”

“No reason you can’t run with us,” Quinlan said stubbornly. Obi-Wan glanced at him, the merest twitch of her helmeted head, then her vocoder crackled with her sigh.

“Fine,” she said, then paused, thoughtfully. “I have three grav charges. If we each throw one, make a three-point screen of blast debris…”

“It might give us enough cover,” Quinlan finished. “Alright. Worth a try. Sarai?”

“If you think it best,” she said through fear- and adrenaline-gritted teeth. 

“Here’s the plan,” Obi-Wan said quickly, between trading shots with the soldiers. Quinlan provided some cover fire as well, so that the Death Watch to their left didn’t shoot Obi-Wan when she was shooting the ones on their right. “I’ll cue us. Arm the charge on my count and then throw it, Sarai toward the middle, Tabin to the left, myself to the right.”

She slipped the grav charges from her belt, passing them to Satine between them. Satine handed one off to Quinlan.

“Alright, on three,” Obi-Wan said, palming the last charge. “One. Two. Three!”

The charges armed with a near-synchronous beep, and they swiftly chucked them as far as they could. As Quinlan expected, they didn’t reach even close enough to the Death Watch soldiers shooting at them. But when they detonated five seconds later, they sent up plumes of dirt and smoke.

“Go!” Obi-Wan said, suiting action to word.

Quinlan launched to his feet, a hand wrapped around Satine’s arm to drag her with him. As he went, he aimed his blaster back over his shoulder and blindly squeezed off a few shots.

They ran.

The soldiers shouted, and some wild blaster shots streaked by. Flames roared as jetpacks fired up.

Quinlan, Obi-Wan, and Satine reached the trees, trying not to lose too much speed as they dodged around heavy, gnarled trunks and twisted, arching roots. He could hear their pursuers, still on their tails. He tried to split his attention between plotting his next steps and submerging himself in the Force, listening for its warnings and whispered hints.

It was thick with warning, which did nothing to make Quinlan feel better. Their chances were very, very bad, if the Force felt like this.

The Death Watch soldiers weren’t shooting at them anymore, but they hadn’t given up. Either they wanted to take them in alive, or they were going to wait until they caught them and then execute them with a little more deliberation. Quinlan wasn’t interested in finding out which.

He pulled Satine around tree, the palms of their clasped hands sweaty with exertion and fear, flickers of movement at the corners of their eyes spurring them to move faster.

There was… and odd sound. A mechanical pop, followed by something like a hiss, as if of something thin and flexible whipping through the air.

Obi-Wan hit the ground with a grunt, and Satine screamed, wrenching her hand from Quinlan’s. He whipped around, taking in the sight of Obi-Wan sprawled on the gritty loam, tearing at something around her legs, the Death Watch soldier bearing down on her, too close, and Satine flinging herself next to Obi-Wan, reaching to help her untangle herself from the fibercord. Quinlan gave a wordless shout of warning, taking a step toward them, and Obi-Wan immediately raised a blaster pistol toward the Death Watch soldier. But too late. Rings of pale light rippled from the enemy’s blaster, the stun blast hitting Obi-Wan squarely in the chest. She collapsed back, loose-limbed and completely unconscious. Satine screamed again, scrabbling for Obi-Wan’s blaster, but a second stun shot dropped her across Obi-Wan’s lap.

At that point, just a couple seconds after Obi-Wan had been tripped, Quinlan reached them, lashing out at the much larger soldier. The soldier had the advantage of armor, but Quinlan’s hand-to-hand was better. He kicked the blaster out of the soldier’s grip, diverted a gauntleted fist past his face instead of into it, jabbed a sharp elbow into the vulnerable crease between the armor collar and helmet, and—

—took a stun bolt to the back. He was conscious just long enough to see the ground rush up toward him, but he never felt himself hit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A 'trill' is one of the characters of the aurebesh alphabet. The Death Watch symbol looks like a really, really messy one.


	10. Containment

Quinlan gasped awake all at once, jack-knifing upright in a wild, animal panic. He couldn’t feel the Force, he couldn’t—!

He flopped like a landed fish and would have fallen to the floor if he hadn’t already been laying on it. His head swam and he heaved and retched, stomach cramping painfully, and oh, there was something—

His hands jerked to his neck, scratching and scrabbling at the band of too-tight metal that pressed against his straining throat, but it was too smooth, his nails couldn’t gain purchase—

“—have to stop. Stop!” a voice commanded. _“Tabin!”_

It didn’t register, at first, his mind almost blank with panic and unable to recognize his own alias. But then, delayed, it clicked. _I am Tabin. I am undercover. I am captured._

Quinlan forced himself calm, reining in his shuddering breaths, pressing his cheek against the cold metal of the floor and trying to compose himself. Bile burned the back of his throat, but he hadn’t been able to bring anything up. That was probably a blessing, really.

Breathing deeply, Quinlan slowly pushed himself up and took stock of their situation. All three of them were in a single, large-ish cell. Everything looked to be made of metal or plasteel. Satine sat on the floor with Obi-Wan’s head in her lap. Quinlan coughed against the collar around his neck.

“Is she…?”

There was a furrow between Satine’s brows that didn’t ease as she looked him over, concern in the slant of her shoulders. Her hands gently sifted through Obi-Wan’s hair in response to his question, her gaze shifting down to the other girl. “Unconscious. Stunned. She… attacked them, when they collared you.”

Quinlan grimaced and gave Obi-Wan’s limp form another once-over. They’d stripped her armor and he could see the discolored rings on her undersuit that were characteristic of too-close stun bolts. There would be bruises on the skin underneath. Stun bolts usually didn’t cause injury, but fired point-blank into flesh, the energy of the blast was more focused. It heated the fibres in fabrics which, depending on the material, caused the discoloration. The focused energy could also break capillaries, causing bruising.

She was lucky that was the extent of it. To be entirely honest, Quinlan was surprised they hadn’t been roughed up more, or even killed outright. Death Watch had clearly recognized Satine and knew enough to put a Force collar on him—

Quinlan’s thoughts screeched to a halt. Collar. _Obi-Wan wasn’t collared._ They must not have realized she also had the Force. Maybe they didn’t even know who she was.

And, oh, hadn’t Satine used his alias even now? That was clever thinking. Even if they were captured, that didn’t mean the game was entirely up. Perhaps if Death Watch wasn’t sure who’d they captured, it would slow down any reprisals against Osan and Master Tholme.

“How long has she been out?” Quinlan asked, trying to compose himself. He couldn’t tell if there were cameras in the cell, but he didn’t want to look too excited and suspicious in case Death Watch was watching. He didn’t want to give away the mistake they’d made in not binding Obi-Wan.

“I’m not sure,” Satine said, worry growing in her expression. “It’s hard to get a sense of the passage of time in here.”

Quinlan grunted, wobbling upright and making his careful way the few steps across the cell to Obi-Wan’s side. With careful (if shaking) fingers, he checked Obi-Wan over for any other injuries beside the bruising. Her skull seemed intact, and he couldn’t feel any fractured ribs or limbs. He sat back on his heels with a weary huff. “Benna will be fine; I couldn’t feel any serious injuries. What about you?”

Some of the tension leaked out of her shoulders. “I’m fine. Just a little shaken and bruised.”

He nodded and grimaced when it made his head swim. He wanted Obi-Wan to wake up, so they could get going on the plan brewing in his mind, get closer to a time when he could get this kriffing collar off his neck. Gingerly, he probed at his own skull, checking for any bumps or bruises. He didn’t think he’d hit his head, but it was possible he hadn’t been conscious for it.

His skull was intact and fine. Which unfortunately meant the nausea and dizziness was from the Force-suppressor… Dank farrik. That meant it was only going to get worse.

_Wake up! Wake up, Obi-Wan!_

“Have they come to talk to us at all?” he asked Satine. She shook her head.

“Not since they put the collar on you and took Benna’s _beskar’gam_.”

Quinlan blew out a breath. “Right, well… I suppose we can guess what they want.”

Satine frowned, curling over Obi-Wan a little. Without the Force, Quinlan couldn’t tell if she was feeling protective of Obi-Wan or felt safer herself with proximity. “Yes. I suppose we can.”

...Kriff, had that been insensitive? Quinlan scrambled for something to say to fix it, but was interrupted by Obi-Wan’s soft groan.

“Benna!” He lunged forward and he and Satine hovered over Obi-Wan as she winced her eyes open and lifted a hand to her head.

“Ow.” Satine helped her slowly sit up, hands at her back. Obi-Wan grimaced, moving stiffly, arm coming up to cradle her ribs and the stun-bruises there. _“Haar’chak.”_

“Take it slow,” Quinlan advised quietly. “You’re going to have a patchwork of bruises in a day or two.”

She looked at him, eyes catching on the collar, and he could see the self-recrimination in her expression easily. He reached out to grab her hand. “Hey, don’t. It’s not even close to your fault.”

“There were too many of them,” she said. “And I couldn’t—”

Couldn’t use the Force without them slapping a collar on her, too. Quinlan nodded. “Yeah, I know. It’s fine.”

She was opening her mouth, doubtless to try to take on the blame anyway, when there’s the sound of a door opening and heavy footsteps. The three of them shared speaking looks, and arranged themselves carefully to wait for their visitors. There must have been security cams; it seemed too much of a coincidence for the visit to come so quickly after they’d all awakened.

Five Death Watch soldiers appeared, fully armored and bearing blasters. They stomped up to the door of the cell and the one in the lead tapped a control on their vambrace. The door slid open and they stomped in, blasters leveled at Quinlan, Obi-Wan, and Satine.

Quinlan didn’t let them have the first word. He looked the lead soldier straight in the visor and quirked an eyebrow. “What’s with the escort? Afraid of the three unarmed teenagers in your holding cell?”

In the split second before he was backhanded with a gauntleted fist, Quinlan could almost swear he felt Obi-Wan’s disapproval, Force-suppressor or no. But he didn’t have time to reflect on her problems with his negotiation tactics—the soldiers lifted their blasters menacingly and their leader kicked Quinlan where he lay on the floor after taking a gauntlet across the face.

“ _Jetii_ scum,” a deep voice snarled. “If you’re smart you’ll keep your tongue behind your teeth.”

“I dunno what you’re talking about,” Quinlan said, coughing a little. The mandos ignored him.

“Tor wants the pleasure of dealing with you himself,” Leader said, taking dark pleasure in the grim implications. “That’s the only reason you’re still alive. But before you think that means we won’t punish bad behavior, consider the fact that he’s not going to complain if you’re _missing pieces_ when you arrive.”

“Tor who?” Quinlan asked. “We don’t understand. Why’d you kidnap us?”

Two of the others—one with a cracked pauldron and one with prominent antennae on the side of their helmet—hauled him up, at least until he was upright enough for Leader to sucker-punch him in the gut. Once again on the floor, he wheezed. Well, he hadn’t thought it’d work, but at least they were focused on him and not Satine or Obi-Wan.

“Just like a Death Watch thug to beat a captive teenager,” Satine said, voice a whipcrack.

 _E chuta_.

Quinlan peeled his watering eyes open just in time to see Cracked Pauldron punch her square in the face. She fell back with a bitten-off sound of pain. Obi-Wan snarled and lunged, aiming straight for Cracked Pauldron’s throat. She grabbed their armor vest, hands curling in the front of the armholes, and then… sort of… twisted and dropped. The weight of her body yanked Cracked Pauldron off-balance, and Obi-Wan smoothly continued the motion with a booted foot in their gut, heaving them totally up and over. Cracked Pauldron flew over Obi-Wan’s head and crashed into the wall.

Quinlan had exactly half a breath to recover before absolute havoc descended on the room. Leader shifted like they were about to go for Obi-Wan, so Quinlan scrabbled at their ankles, still gasping for breath. He got a hand around one and yanked just as Leader was trying to take a step, making them stumble slightly. It was just long enough to Quinlan to lunge up and tackle them, arms locking around their waist. They went down in a tangle of limbs and with a clatter of armor. What little breath was left in Quinlan’s lungs was forced out with a huff as they landed, Leader’s cuisses slamming against his sternum. Leader recovered faster and kicked Quinlan off. Quinlan’s head rang with the boot impact, but that pain was nothing compared to the absolute agony that erupted when the collar around his neck shocked him.

His teeth clicked together and he tasted blood, unable even to scream.

It took him a moment to realize that the shock had stopped, sound filtering back to him slowly, his vision clearing from the white haze. He groaned, blinking, his entire body one big ache.

“Feral kriffing tooka,” said one of the other mandos, hauling Obi-Wan bodily against the wall, an arm across her throat. She gave a credible yowl of pain and rage, trying to kick. No-name turned so her foot just caught their armor, then pinned her even more firmly. Not far away, Antennae pinned Satine to the floor with a knee between her shoulder blades.

Leader moved toward Obi-Wan, leaving Quinlan writhing on the floor behind. They reached across No-name’s arms and tilted Obi-Wan’s chin. No-name huffed, warning: “Careful, she bites.”

Leader inspected Obi-Wan’s face. “You can’t be more than a year past your _verd’goten_ , but you have heart. What’s your name?”

Obi-Wan was 16, in fact, but she’d always looked younger than she was. She didn’t correct Leader and instead snapped her teeth at him. Quinlan reflected that being adopted by a Mandalorian had clearly given her bad habits. Leader tightened his grip on her face, to the point that she hissed in pain.

“It’s too bad whoever trained you didn’t include lessons on respecting your betters,” Leader said.

“Don’t see any betters here,” Obi-Wan said in a tone of voice Quinlan remembered from their childhood together. He grimaced. There was a moment of silence, probably with everyone present marveling at her absolute audacity, sassing them like that after everything. Finally, Leader gave a slow, dark laugh.

“You three were traveling with an adult _Jetii_ and a _dar’manda_ coward, weren’t you? I think we’ll start the interrogation as to their whereabouts with you, little tooka.”

“No!” Satine shouted, bucking and trying to get out of Antennae’s pin. “No! Benna!”

Before Quinlan could protest as well, his collar activated again. He thought maybe he felt his forehead crack against the floor, but the sensation was a faint shadow beside the electrocution. He also thought he lost some time, because when his vision cleared again, the soldiers were gone and so was Obi-Wan.

“Ah, kriff,” he groaned, and rolled onto his back from the curled—was he in the rescue position? He lifted his head, looking blearily around before spotting Satine, hugging her knees nearby. “Did you put me in the rescue position?”

Her head lifted where it was pillowed on her knees. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “Yes.”

Quinlan fought a wince at her hoarse voice. She must have been crying, and no wonder. Things were looking decidedly bleak. He pushed himself upright, though his entire body shrieked in protest at the movement. “Thanks. How long has it been?”

She shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure. Maybe a couple hours?”

“They still have Benna?”

A nod. Quinlan gave a surreptitious sigh. He wished they hadn’t spoken up, that they’d let him take the heat from Death Watch, but he couldn’t really be upset with them for not realizing his intent. He hadn’t really had time to tell them his plan, and without the Force he couldn’t have done so covertly once their captors were present.

He just hoped they didn’t hurt Obi-Wan so badly that she’d have trouble contacting Master Tholme; long-distance Force communication was difficult and took a lot of concentration. If she came back concussed or in too much pain she wouldn’t be able to manage it, most likely. Quinlan dragged himself across the floor to sit back against the wall next to Satine.

“Are you alright?” she asked. “You were seizing and…”

He weighed the truth against a white lie, and decided she probably wanted the truth. She kept revealing herself to be fairly pragmatic, for all her idealism and foibles. “The sooner we get out of here, the better. The collar isn’t great, and the electrocution is worse. I’m going to slowly get less and less useful the longer this goes on.”

“I see,” she replied, paler than ever. She met his gaze, looking like she was about to say something, but bit her lip as if to keep the words in.

“It’ll be alright,” Quinlan assured her, smiling. He wasn’t actually sure of that, but he was going to do his best to make it so. She gave him a wobbly smile that told him she knew what he was doing, but didn’t call him on it. They sat side by side on the cold metal flooring, a silent vigil awaiting the return of Obi-Wan.

Quinlan had slipped into a half-trance, an odd and empty meditation without the Force, when they heard the scrape of a door opening and approaching footsteps. Alarmingly, the sound was accompanied by a dragging sound. In wordless accord, he and Satine stood.

Cracked Pauldron hauled a staggering and clearly only partially conscious Obi-Wan to the cell’s door, dragging her when she couldn’t move fast enough for them, and tossed her bodily inside as soon as the door opened.

“Here’s your little friend back,” they sneered. Satine gave a cry and rushed forward to catch Obi-Wan before she fell. Quinlan rushed forward and caught them both when Satine proved too willowy to keep her balance under the dazed weight of Obi-Wan. Arms around the two girls, he slowly lowered them all to the floor, ignoring the bone-deep ache of his own injuries.

Satine was crying again, cupping Obi-Wan’s face in both hands, steadying her lolling head. “Benna, Benna. Open your eyes, please. Look at me, Benna. Please, open your eyes.”

Quinlan quickly checked Obi-Wan over as Satine pleaded her back to consciousness. More bruises, burns, a couple ugly marks that looked like Obi-Wan struggled against some needle pokes… That explained her disorientation.

Obi-Wan made a soft, pained noise of confusion. Quinlan looked up to watch her eyes flutter open, unfocused and glassy. Satine gasped a little sob. “There you are. Oh, there you are.”

She leaned in and pressed her forehead against Obi-Wan’s, tears clinging to her eyelashes as she squeezed her eyes shut. Blindly, Obi-Wan’s hands rose to grasp at the back of Satine’s shirt. Quinlan thought maybe he should be feeling jealousy at the intimacy, or maybe embarrassment at watching it so closely, but all he felt was relief. Obi-Wan was alright, mostly, un-collared, and whatever drugs they’d used on her would wear off eventually. Speaking of...

He leaned in and pressed his forehead against the side of Obi-Wan’s head, putting his mouth right by her ear. Hoping whatever surveillance Death Watch had in the cell wasn’t powerful enough to pick up his voice, he breathed into her ear: “You have to filter the drugs out. You’re the only one who can contact our Shadow.”

Hopefully she could hear him alright, and hopefully she was cognizant enough to process his words. He suspected that their clock was ticking even faster than he’d originally feared. Death Watch was presumably taking them to Mandalore, to Tor Vizsla according to what they’d said, at which point they would be executed. But if Death Watch kept treating them like this, there would barely be anything left to execute by the time they arrived.

Quinlan tightened his arms around Satine and Obi-Wan. They really, _really_ needed to get a mayday out to Master Tholme…


	11. Appendix

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is going to shift as I add more chapters to this fic. It'll always be at the end, and I'll be adding to it as more Mando'a is used in the story. If you're looking for the most recent story chapter, go back one. (I just kinda hate putting translations in the notes; depending on how much usage is in a chapter, this can make notes super long and it makes me twitchy).

**Mando’a Glossary**

I use mandoa.org to help with translations, but Mando'a isn't a fully-fledged language so some vocab and grammar are of my own construction. I've tried to note which are which. I can answer questions if anyone has any, but I'm not an expert by any stretch; I just like playing with language.

**Words**

_ Aliit’urcye -  _ clan meet

_ Alor’liit  _ \- The leader ( _ alor _ ) of a clan ( _ aliit _ ).

_ Beskad _ \- a saber-style sword of Mandalorian iron, plural  _ beskade _ (canon)

_ Buir _ \- parent (canon)

_ Chakaare  _ \- low-lifes (sing.  _ chakaar _ ) (canon)

_ Chiruir -  _ a milky tea, slightly sweet

_ Demagolka  _ \- war criminal, someone who commits atrocities, plural  _ demagolkase  _ (canon)

_ Elek _ \- yes (canon)

_ Haar’chak  _ \- damn it (canon)

_ Hut’uun _ \- coward (canon)

_ Jare’la  _ \- suicidal, foolishly reckless (canon)

_ Jetii  _ \- Jedi (canon)

_ Jetii’ad -  _ child-jedi (Padawan)

_ Jet’ika _ \- little Jedi (diminutive, affectionate)

_ Karyai  _ \- the main living area of a traditional Mandalorian home, used for eating, talking, and resting (kind of like the great hall in European castles) (canon)

_ Meshgeroya -  _ a sport, lit. “beautiful game” (canon)

_ Ori’ramikad -  _ supercommando. A word associated with Jaster Mereel’s True Mandalorian faction, as he and his followers adhered to his Supercommando Codex (canon word, usage mine)

_ Verde  _ \- warriors, singular  _ verd _ (canon)

_ Verd’goten  _ \- Mandalorian coming of age ritual, takes place around the age of 13. Those who pass the trials are considered adults (canon)

**Phrases**

_ Aru’e be ner’aru’e cuyi narudar -  _ the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend (lit. temporary ally) (canon words, formulation mine)

_ Kote bal kyr’am -  _ glory and death (canon words, phrase mine)

_ Kote lo’shebs’ul’narit _ \- You can stick your glory where the sun don’t shine (shebs means buttocks, folks, extrapolate from there) (canon phrase)

_ Mandalore su’cuyi -  _ Mandalore lives (formulation mine)

_ Me’copaani? Suum ca’nara? Kegana!  _ \- What do you want? Peaceful bliss? Have it! (canon phrases, minus ‘kegana’ which was constructed from other words)

_ Shabla di’kutla jetiise; val mirshse solus!  _ \- Frigging idiotic Jedi; their brain cells are lonely! (with the implication that they each only have one) (altered canon phrases)

_ Saar’urcye mhi  _ \- We’ll meet soon. (‘saar’ is completely made-up, because there doesn’t seem to be a word for ‘soon’ in mando’a, but the phrase comes from canon ‘ret’urcye mhi’) 

_ Su cuy’gar, Mando’ade.  _ \- Greetings, people of Mandalore. (canon phrases)

_ Udesii, Ob’ika. Kar’tayli.”  _ \- Easy, Obi-Wan (affectionate). I know. (canon, minus Ob’ika)

_ Vencuyot be’mando’ade nu kyr’am bat’kyrbej. Mandalore su’cuyi!  _ \- The future of the children of Mandalore is not death on the battlefield. Mandalore lives! (canon words, formulation mine)

**Author's Note:**

> If you're looking at the tags, you might notice some pairings will eventually be happening. It's not going to be much of a focus, but there will be some attraction and possibly kissing between characters, so just FYI.
> 
> I think I like fanon Quinlan a little better than canon Quinlan (why's he gotta be a jerk to my boys the clones, huh??), so if he seems out of character it's because I'm stubbornly going to write him the way I want. Which is to say, he's gonna be rough around the edges and kinda grey but mostly a hero type (like Han, I guess).


End file.
